Yao Bikuni, the nun shown in Kyoto in 1449

In 1449 diarists in Kyoto wrote down reports of a nun from Wakasa shown to paying visitors, and they did not agree on her age.¹²³⁵ The court clerk Nakahara Yasutomi heard she was over 200; the noble Hirohashi Tsunamitsu and the Zen monk Zuikei Shūhō wrote 800.⁵ None of them says why she lived so long, and none mentions a mermaid.⁴

Obama, the Wakasa town of today’s story, enters the record much later. Togashi Akira argues that two of its temples tended her cave and wrote new origin texts between the late 1600s and the mid-1700s.⁷

Shown for a fee at the Great Jizō Hall

In the fifth month of 1449 Yasutomi heard that a nun from Wakasa was being shown for money in a Kyoto hall.² Yasutomi’s diary has the entry, dated the 26th.² The era name changed from Bun’an to Hōtoku on the 28th day of the seventh month, so entries from the fifth to the seventh month belong to Bun’an 6, though reference works give the year as Hōtoku 1.⁹ Days are given here as the diaries write them.

Yasutomi writes at second hand: someone says that around the 20th a nun called the white nun, more than 200 years old, has come up from Wakasa.² Everyone found it extraordinary.² At the Great Jizō Hall on Nijō Higashi-no-tōin a low “mouse door” was set up, and she was shown, a fee taken from each person.² An official called the Kanmu went to look.² After talk in the streets that it was not right, or could not be so (the phrase reads both ways), she went back down to Wakasa that day.²

The old man’s remark matters more than it looks. It says a nun of that name was already known in Kyoto before 1449, which is how Togashi reads it too, and he takes the fee to be a kind of fundraising.¹⁰ The next day Yasutomi notes a second nun, from the eastern provinces, about fifty, with some twenty companions, lecturing on the Lotus Sutra at another Jizō hall.¹¹ Togashi counts both among the travelling groups of religious women who drew crowds in Kyoto with marvels.¹²

Eight hundred, in two other hands

Two other diarists wrote down 800.¹³³ Hirohashi Tsunamitsu, a court noble, records on the 8th day of the sixth month that the white nun is said to come to the palace.¹¹³

He goes on that she goes home today, wonders whether she is a creature in disguise (our reading of an uncertain word) or an ill omen, and closes with “say no more”.¹³ The next day he writes that she did not come to the palace after all.¹³ Earth tremors ran through that spring and summer.¹⁴ He notes a great quake at the dawn bell on the 4th of the sixth month and, on the first of the seventh, that the shaking had lasted more than 75 days.¹⁴ Togashi reads his “strange” and “ill omen” against that unrest, while the townspeople crowded to see her anyway.¹⁴

On the 26th of the seventh month Zuikei Shūhō visited a hermitage near Kiyomizu, where the master told him an old nun of 800 had lately come into the capital from Wakasa.³ She kept her gate shut, so the high-born paid a hundred coins to be let in and the low ten.³ Sōgen, a monk there, answered with a monk of 700 who used to beg in the city from beside Seigan-ji.³

The diaries do not settle which age is right.⁵ They also leave open whether one group stayed in Kyoto for two months or several took turns.²¹³³ Yanagita Kunio held that one group stayed, and Togashi, who weighs both, thinks that more likely.¹⁵

A herb, then a mermaid

A tale of 1480, Fudeyui no monogatari by Ishii Yasunaga, sends a party of raccoon-dogs from Tamba to Kyoto to meet the white nun of Wakasa.¹⁶ Togashi reads it as built on the 1449 visit.¹⁶ She tells them her long life comes from a herb, kuko (wolfberry), that her mother took every day.¹⁶ She puts her age at about 900, calls herself the white nun of Wakasa, and adds that some people have lately begun to call her Yao Bikuni.¹⁶

The mermaid is in Hayashi Razan’s Honchō jinja kō, a book of shrines that Togashi dates to between 1638 and 1645.¹⁷ Razan says his late father told him the story and that he heard it as a child; Togashi puts that around 1590.¹⁸¹⁹¹⁷ In the Tohoku University copy of the book, the white nun’s father meets a stranger in the mountains and is taken to a place that is almost another world.¹⁸ The stranger gives him a mermaid and says that eating it lengthens life and stops ageing.¹⁸ The father carries it home, and his daughter finds it in his sleeve and eats it.¹⁸

In Razan’s text the nun lives to “more than four hundred years”, not 800.¹⁹ The Wakasa kokuden-ki, a gazetteer Togashi dates to the Kanbun years (1661 to 1673), quotes the passage with “four hundred years”.¹⁸²⁰²¹ Togashi says that after the diaries the records of the legend stop for about 150 years, until Razan, and that how the story took shape in those years remains to be studied.⁶

The same gazetteer tells a second story. Several people of Obama, blown off course in a storm, land on an island with a golden-towered gate and are fed a dish that looks like human flesh.²⁰ A girl eats the meat and lives to 800, and people think the island was Hōrai and the meat a mermaid’s.²⁰ The Wakan sansai zue, dated 1712 by Togashi, has an entry on Kūin-ji that gives the nun 800 years and the looks of a girl of fifteen or sixteen.²² It then says that some claim she ate a mermaid and that this is not so.²³

What Obama built around her

The Sekai daihyakka jiten gives her an address, a cave at Kūin-ji in Obama, and says she looked fifteen or sixteen.²² The Edo texts that give the cave are late, and they are not sure what it is.²⁰²⁵²⁶

The Wakasa kokuden-ki lists a Yao Bikuni cave in the grounds of Kūin-ji and says her place of death is unknown.²⁰ The Wakasa gunken-shi of 1693 gives the cave as the rock where, tradition says, she hid.²⁵ Kinoshita Gaisō’s Shūi zatsuwa, finished in 1764, says her grave was moved into the cave in the Kanbun years, after visitors had taken the grave for a couple’s, and says the grave in the cave is not an old thing.²⁶ We read the first two on page images; the third only as Togashi quotes it.

The Sakai family, lords of the Obama domain, are the other part of the story. Kūin-ji is their family temple and took its name in 1662 from the sobriquet of Sakai Tadakatsu.²⁷ Togashi reports from the Shūi zatsuwa that the Shinmei shrine in the same town made a new statue bearing the Sakai crest, with its first origin text, in 1740, and showed it in Kyoto in 1759.²⁸ A third strand is a small shrine west of town, built in 1619 after a nun’s shape was seen dancing and vanishing when it met people; Togashi reports from an eighteenth-century gazetteer of unknown authorship that people there pray against toothache.²⁹

Togashi’s argument is that the domain’s finances began to run short under its second lord, and that the two temples, which needed money to keep the standing the Sakai gave them, used the nun to raise it.⁷ He gives the temples’ origin texts as evidence that they disagree on her birth and death, and that each gives the cave as her place of death.³⁰ The argument is his inference, and we found no second scholar who tests it. Our reading is narrower. The diaries already give her 800 years, and Razan already gives her a mermaid, so what Obama adds is a place to visit: a cave, a grave, a statue.^4182628

How the diaries got into the story

Togashi points out that the diaries were private, and that their entries became widely known only when Edo-period gazetteers of Wakasa copied them.³¹ Chika Genemon’s Mukō jaku-roku of 1671 says he read Nakahara Yasutomi’s family diary, and gives the white nun and the eastern nun as having met and talked.³¹ The two entries we read do not say they met.²¹¹ The Wakasa kokushi of 1749 quotes the Yasutomi-ki and the Gaun nikkenroku.³¹

Traditions of the nun now run far beyond Wakasa. Togashi collected 164 cases between Iwate and Saga, and Takahashi Harumi, counting another way, found 166 traditions in 1982.³² Nomura Jun’ichi guesses that groups of women who called themselves Yao Bikuni carried it, as the Kumano bikuni carried theirs by picture-telling.³³ Togashi adds that origin texts sold by the Obama temples reached temples in Niigata and Gunma, which gave her local families as descendants.³⁰

Togashi names the stretch between the diaries and Razan, about 150 years, as the one still to be explained.⁶ The one text we know from it, the 1480 tale, still gives her a herb.¹⁶