Sitonai
Sitonai is a mythical Ainu heroine, known for a legend of slaying a giant snake of Akaiwa mountain.
Synopsis
In a cave in Akaiwa mountain there lived a giant serpent that demanded the sacrifice of maidens from the village below, once a year on the 15th day of the eighth month. The town officials, afraid of the creature, give in to its horrible requests and send a maiden to the cave's opening.On the tenth year after nine years of sacrificing children, the youngest of six daughters of the village chief, Sitonai, aged 12 or 13, volunteers to be next sacrifice. In other version she is the 9th sacrifice, the youngest of nine daughters and aged 15.
Sitonai goes to the cave with a makiri knife and her faithful hunting dog, and along the way they hunt a deer and a bear and acquire their meat. She then sets a trap for the snake by leaving the meat out in front of its den as bait, and waits hidden for the snake to exit its cave. When the snake comes out under the light of the full moon, it sees the bear and deer carcasses and begins to swallow them, but it digests it slowly. While its mouth is stuffed with bear and working on the deer, Sitonai orders her dog to attack, and it savagely bites into serpent's otherwise occupied throat, fighting with it until it stops moving, at which time Sitonai takes her makiri and finishes it off. In one version, she delivers a "perfect" finishing strike. She then enters the cave and gathers the remains of all the previous sacrifices for burial while lamenting on how the girls before her were all so weak that they were eaten by what proved to be just a mere snake, and she and the dog return to the village with the gathered bones.
From this time on, a peaceful life came to the village, but for fear of haunting, local people decided to celebrate and enshrine the Hakuryu Daigongen in this cave. The Akaiwa mountain shrine was also linked with a legend of sighting of a white dragon rising to the heavens when a Shugendo monk practiced in a cave at the beginning of the Meiji era.
There are two main versions of the Sitonai legend. One of the first records of the former version comes from the newspaper reporter Aoki Junji and of the latter from a local historian Hashimoto Gyou/Takashi. Aoki's version is told by: アイヌの伝説と其情話, 北海道の口碑伝説, 北海道昔ばなし, 伝説は生きている: 写真で見る北海道の口承文芸. Hashimoto's version appears in: 北海道郷土史研究, 昔話北海道, 少年少女日本伝説全集1, コタンの大蛇：小人のコロボックルほか.