Shippeitaro
Shippeitaro or Shippei Taro is the name of a helper dog in the Japanese fairy tale by the same name.
Etymology
Although the name Shippeitaro has been written 竹篦太郎 suggesting a connection to a bamboo hitting stick in Buddhist religion, it has been asserted to be a corruption of Shippūtarō meaning "swift wind Tarō", and the same characters can also be read Hayatetarō, thus explaining variant names such as Hayatarō "swift Tarō".Variant traditions
Translations include "Schippeitaro" in Andrew Lang's Violet Fairy Book, taken from a German copy, and Mrs. James's "Schippeitaro", which share the same plotline: The mountain spirit and its minions demand a yearly human sacrifice of a maiden from the local village. A young warrior overhears the spirits hinting that their would-be bane was "Shippeitaro", which turns out to be a dog. This dog is substituted for the maiden to be placed inside the sacrificial container, and when the spirits arrive, the warrior and dog attack the cats and vanquish them.The evil spirits appear as monkeys in most instances of the tale, as in the version of "Shippei Taro" given in Keigo Seki's anthology. In fact, this folktale is classified as "Destroying the Monkey Demon" tale type by Japanese folklorists.
Monkey God tales preserved in the medieval anthologies Konjaku Monogatarishū and Uji Shūi Monogatari have been suggested as being the original sources of the orally disseminated versions.
There is also the theory that the story was invented after the historical occasion of the shrine in Iwata, Shizuoka sending volumes of sutras to the Kōzen-ji temple, Nagano Prefecture in 1793. The dog is called Hayatarō or Heibōtarō in the versions at the temple and in folktales of the vicinity. But the dog name has been standardized as Shippeitarō in the region of the shrine.
Nomenclature
The term shippei denotes a "bamboo staff" in Zen Buddhism, and is connected with the expression shippegaeshi meaning "repercussion" or "".However, it has been asserted that the name Shippeitarō―was originally unconnected with religious implement―and was a corruption of Shippūtarō, meaning "swift wind Tarō", which as a matter of commonplace knowledge, can also be read Hayatetarō, and the same scholar points out that the dog is known by the forms Shippeitarō or Hayatetarō in local legend.
In variants, the dog may have Suppeitarō, Suppetarō or a variety of other names, for example, "Hayatarō of Kōzenji temple in Shinano". The dog may not be given any name at all.
The form Shippeitarō has been adopted as standard or official one for the dog of legend attached to the shrine, commonly known as Mitsuke Tenjin.
The name is altered to 執柄太郎 in kibyōshi fiction by Nansenshō Somahito, where shippei means "to grasp authority"
Translations
The version of "Schippeitaro" in Andrew Lang's The Violet Fairy Book was taken from Japanische Märchen und Sagen collected by Professor .The story of "Schippeitaro" as told by Mrs. T. H. James, was number 17 in the "Japanese Fairy Tale Series" printed by Hasegawa Takejirō, who issued many such chirimen-bon or "crepe-paper books". Mrs. James's version follows a storyline identical to Lang's version.
The illustrator has been identified as, based on the colophon of 1889 which names the artist as Suzuki Sōsaburō. Even though this can be read as "Munesaburō", the artist Suzuki Kason went by the common name Sōtarō, also written Sōtarō.
Synopsis
Below is the summary of the Lang/Mrs. James version:A young adventure-seeking warrior entered an enchanted forest, and he slept in a shrine there, and was awakened at midnight by the noises of cats yelling and dancing. The cats could be heard saying: "Do not tell Shippeitaro!"
Afterwards, the warrior visited a nearby village, and there he answered a girl's plea for help. It was the village custom to sacrifice a maiden to the mountain spirit, and it was her turn that year. She was placed inside a cage and left at the shrine. The warrior made inquiries to find out about the famous dog Schippeitaro, owned by the prince's overseer, and obtained permission to borrow the dog. The warrior then replaced the maiden inside the cage with Schippeitaro. The cage was brought to the shrine, and the cats arrived. When the huge black cat opened the cage, Shippeitaro jumped out and killed it. The warrior entered the fray and together they killed several more cats, and the rest of them fled. The warrior returned Schippeitaro to his rightful owner, and the village well-remembered the warrior and the heroic dog long after.
Variants
The Lang/Mrs. James version which features cats as the antagonists is actually atypical in folktales. In most Shippeitaro tales, the malevolent spirits appear as monkeys. However, cats did feature as the antagonist of Shippeitarō in the gesaku novels of the Edo Period as well as in the kabuki and kyōgen performing arts.The village where the victims are sacrifice occurs may be an anonymous location, as in the English chirimen book version or Seki's version from Monou, but may be specified. Also, it is a common motif that the household chosen to have their daughter sacrificed has a stuck on the front of their home.
Keigo Seki collected a number of variant tales from various sources. When Seki published Nihon mukashibanashi taisei, his provisional count reached 67 examples. Later, and co-edited the Nihon mukashibanashi tsūgan which added numerous examples. Kōichirō Kōbayashi's paper has collated these and other examples in a table with 227 tale specimens. Noriko Nagata went further and analyzed 258 tale examples of the Sarugami taiji type. Note however that these statistics include tales that are not of the "dog helper" type.
Seki's typical example was the "Shippei Taro" collected in Monou District, Miyagi, published in Keigo Seki, Robert J. Adams, Folktales of Japan. The priest in the story defeated the so-called "ogres". He used the usual tactic of replacing the sacrificial maiden inside the chest with Shippei Taro, a dog brought from the distant city of Nagahama in Ōmi Province.
Inada and Ozawa's description of the "helper dog" subtype of Sarugami taiji names the dog as Suppeitarō of Tango Province, and the human as a, a type of itinerant Buddhist ascetic as combating the monkey monster, indicating these are seen as typical elements. Here, "Suppei" is easily recognized as the Tōhoku dialect pronunciation of "Shippei".
The dog may or may not have a name at all. And the name is not entirely consistent. The dog's name may be only a slight variant of Shippeitaro, such as or altogether different. The dog may be Shippeitarō/Suppetarō from Ōmi or Tanba or some other province. In several examples, the dog appears as Hayatarō or Heibōtarō of temple in Shinano Province.
Shizuoka and Nagano
According to one scholar the form Shippeitarō tends to occur near Enshū/Tōtomi Province, while Hayatarō is concentrated in Shinano Province. One etymological hypothesis is that in the Shinano dialect, denoted "wolf cub", which probably gave rise to the name Heibōtarō, and Hayatarō may well be a further corruption of this.Yanahime-jinja
It has become current-day tradition that the heroic was dog Shippeitarō from Kōzen-ji temple in Shinano Province.But in actuality, the name of the dog in the legend attached to the shrine varied, and was also known alternately by the similar names Shippūtarō/Hayatetarō or Hayatarō, as already noted In an old document, Tōtōmi koseki zue by dating to Kyowa 3, the legendary dog of this shrine at Mitsuke-juku was Yazaemon. However, Ichikawa Danjūrō VII in a piece of document entitled Tōtōmimasu wrote that the local tradition called the dog Shippeitarō of Tanba Province.
Thus, while Noriko Nagata's study concluded that all the dogs in the Sarugami taiji tales of Shizuoka Prefecture have feature dogs from Shinshū, this only applies to the folktales gathered in relatively current times, and this generalization fails in the Edo Period literature where the dog is Yazaemon from Raifuku-ji of Mikawa Province in Tōtōmi koseki zue, and Danjūrō recorded Shippeitarō as being from Tanba.
Nagata also hypothesizes that "every dog comes from Shinshū in Sarugami taiji tales of Shizukoa, and this can hardly be unconnected with Kōzen-ji ". One can infer that none of the folktales, at least from Shizuoka, explicitly named Kōzen-ji, as can be verified in Kobayashi's study also. Yabe concurs with Nagata more assertive states that in the "present-day tradition", the dog "Shippeitarō" comes from Kōzen-ji in Shinano. However, the only attestation he uses to corroborate is not genuine collected folklore in intact form, but rather a retold summary given in a 1984 city folklore research book.
The connection is certainly not unfounded, if documents and tales from Nagano are examined. Already during the Edo Period, one origin tale regarding the temple, entitled states that human sacrifices to the Mitsuke Tanjin shrine were ongoing, and the victims were saved, though it was thanks to the holy Buddha medicine, rather than a dog. Another engi of the temple also refers to "Tenmangū in Enshū Province" requiring villagers be offered inside a coffin.
vaguely suggested that the legend was created at a late period, by which he may have meant the "latter half of kinsei" i.e. 18th century. And Tokiwa Aoshima supposed that the legend was created after the occasions of the Yanahime-jinja shrine sending 600 volumes of sutra to Kōzen-ji in 1793, and the temple holding a kaichō in 1794. Though these hypotheses require further analysis to assay their validity, if the latter were true, then there was always a connection between the shrine legend and Kōzen-ji, though unattested by the Edo period documents found by Yabe.