Daidarabotchi, the Giant Who Made Mountains and Lakes

The most charming thing about the legends of Daidarabotchi is that the giant is almost always explaining the landscape right in front of you. That mountain is a pile of earth the giant heaped up; that pond is its footprint; that hollow is where it sat down to rest. These are not ghost stories meant to frighten. They are said to have been told to give the shape of the land a reason for being.

This time, let's step away from the famous tales about Mt. Fuji and Lake Biwa and look at the giant through an old record and some everyday place names.

A shell-eating giant in an ancient record

Giant legends turn up even in very old writings. The *Hitachi Fudoki*, a regional record compiled in the Nara period (the 700s), is said to include a story about a huge person living on a hill who reached all the way down to the shore, picked up shellfish to eat, and left the shells piled so high they became a hill. The place is identified as Ogushi, in what is now Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, where there really is a shell mound.

The giant in that record isn't called Daidarabotchi. Even so, the story later came to be introduced as one of the oldest forms of the Daidarabotchi legend.

What's lovely here is the way the tale explains a genuine puzzle: why are heaps of seashells buried in a hill far from the sea? Today we know shell mounds are traces of how ancient people lived. But in a time when no one knew that, a giant with a very long reach may simply have made more sense.

Footprints that became place names

Daidarabotchi is also said to have left its footprints in place names. A well-known example is Daita, a neighborhood in Setagaya, Tokyo, which local tradition says is named after the giant's footprint.

The folklorist Yanagita Kunio took a keen interest in this. He walked the outskirts of Tokyo looking for hollows and ponds that people called the giant's footprints, and wrote about the Daidarabotchi legends. Though the giant's name shifts a little from region to region, the same kind of story is found across a wide area, and Yanagita is said to have seen in this a trace of older beliefs.

Other yokai leave footprints too. The Ippon-datara, for example, is a mountain yokai said to leave only a trail of single footprints in the snow. You find the trace before you ever see the creature, and from that trace you imagine someone unseen. There's something very human about stories like that.

Why tell the landscape through a giant?

Mountains and lakes have been there far longer than any human lifetime. With no way to know when or how they formed, people pictured someone big enough to match them.

And the Daidarabotchi tales are usually rather easygoing. Earth spilled while the giant was carrying it became a little hill; the place it stopped to rest became a hollow. There are few scary moments. Rather than a creature that harms people, it seems to have been loved as a hardworking, slightly careless "land-making giant."

Giant legends are spread across Japan, especially from the Kanto region to the Chubu region. Browse the legend sites on the Yokai Map, and the next time you pass a familiar hill or pond, try imagining it might be someone's footprint.