Daidarabotchi（Daidarabotchi）

A Giant’s Footprints Across Musashino

Musashino’s Daidarabotchi traditions are concerned less with an encounter than with terrain said to remain after the giant has passed. Hollows called footprints, spring-fed ponds, and hills or mounds called loads of earth allow an unseen body’s stride and stance to be imagined across the land.

In “Daidara-bō no Ashiato,” included in his 1934 *Hitotsume Kozō Sonota*, Kunio Yanagita counted Tokyo among the centers of Japanese giant lore. Walking around Daita and toward Komazawa, he recorded roadside dips, mud at their bottoms, springs, and small ponds in a suburban landscape under development. Daidarabotchi’s scale was inferred from changes in ground level before any claim to have seen him^[1].

The 1919 Record:
Senzoku Pond as a Staff Mark

An early record from the Senzoku Pond area is “Musashino no Kyojin Mintan,” published by Tanigawa Iwao, later Ōba Iwao, in the December 1919 issue of *Musashino*, vol. 2, no. 3. Tanigawa adopted the Ōba surname in 1928 and later worked as the archaeologist Ōba Iwao^[3].

In the farmer’s account quoted by Toshiaki Nagasawa, Suribachiyama at Ōokayama and Mujinakubo at Senzoku are where Daidarabotchi braced his feet. He took soil from the sea at Shinagawa with one hand, set it down on the other side, and made Mount Fuji. Senzoku Pond formed where he planted his staff. Two hollows, the pond, the sea, and Mount Fuji are placed within one posture and gesture^[4].

A staff is not common to every Daidarabotchi account. Here, it incorporates Senzoku Pond into a bodily action that the giant’s two feet alone cannot connect.

The 1983 Printed Account:
Koike and Senzoku Reassigned

A different account, introduced by Nagasawa from page 484 of the folklore source volume of the 1983 *History of Ōta Ward*, distributes the giant’s actions differently. Soil rose into Suribachiyama beneath his braced right foot; his left foot made Mujinakubo. His staff hole became Koike Pond, while Senzoku Pond was where urine collected. It shares place names with the 1919 record but assigns them different actions^[8].

• 1919 record: Suribachiyama and Mujinakubo are the giant’s planted feet; Senzoku Pond is the staff mark.
• Account printed in 1983: Suribachiyama rises under the right foot; Mujinakubo is the left-foot hollow; Koike Pond is the staff hole; Senzoku Pond is the mark of urination.
• 1996 children’s book: A later retelling for children in which urination makes Senzoku Pond.

*Daidarabotchi*, written by Nomura Shōji and illustrated by Abe Kōyō^[9], carries the later account into modern children’s literature. Its story cannot be projected back onto the 1919 record. Keeping the dates and arrangements distinct prevents the several origins attached to Senzoku Pond from being conflated.

What the Variants Say About Oral Tradition

The 1919 and 1983 accounts are variants that attach different bodily actions to the same ground. Oral stories can change with teller, audience, landscape, and circumstances of collection. No intermediate record directly connecting these accounts has been found, so it cannot be shown that one gradually became the other.

The dates mark when their arrangements can be verified in print, not when the stories began. Without evidence filling the interval, they are best treated as distinct variants using the same group of landforms. Both draw Suribachiyama, Mujinakubo, Senzoku Pond, and, in the later account, Koike Pond into a single giant’s pose; the 1919 account extends that scale to the sea at Shinagawa and Mount Fuji.

Valley-Floor Ponds and Springs

Legendary and natural explanations do not cancel each other out. Ōta Ward’s survey locates Senzoku Pond and Koike Pond at the bottoms of valleys carved into the Ebara upland by running water, with bowl-shaped slopes descending toward them. Another ward account identifies springs at the end of the Musashino upland as Senzoku Pond’s main water source and notes its older name, the “Great Pond” of Senzoku-gō. Water gathers easily in such low ground; its conspicuous depressions could then be told as marks of giant feet or a staff^[5].

Geomorphology explains the land through upland, valley, watercourse, and spring. Giant stories show how people felt that scene through bodily scale and attached it to place names. A story that calls Senzoku Pond urine does not claim a geological cause: it imagines a great volume of water and a deep hollow as one movement of an immense body.

Ancient “People of Antiquity” and “Great Men”

Ancient *fudoki* also explain terrain through giants. In the Ōkushi Hill passage of the *Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki*, an unnamed “person of antiquity” is large enough to sit on a hill and gather shore shellfish. The shells pile up into a hill; surviving texts give the footprint as more than forty paces long and more than twenty paces wide, and the urine hole as more than twenty paces in diameter. The footprint width and urine-hole diameter are separately recorded as more than twenty paces^[2]. Ōkushi Hill is identified with the Early Jōmon Ōgushi Shell Mound, but the text does not call its giant Daidarabotchi.

The Taka District passage of the *Harima no Kuni Fudoki* tells of a “great man” who bent over low ground and walked upright over high ground, leaving footprints that became marshes. Daidarabotchi’s name does not appear here either^[10]. These ancient accounts are comparison material, not first appearances of the later yokai.

Kunio Yanagita and a Possible Giant Deity

Yanagita compared regional names and stories of footprints, carried mountains, spilled earth, springs, and excretion. He wondered whether they recalled an old giant deity that opened the land, and whether sacred landmaking narratives might later have become tales of a giant failing to carry a mountain or comic folktales.

That was a comparative-folklore hypothesis, not proof that a particular land-creating deity in the *Kojiki* or *Nihon Shoki* had become Daidarabotchi. Yanagita himself resisted a simple claim that a giant story in modern Hitachi had remained unchanged from the *Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki* for over a thousand years^[1]. “People of antiquity,” “great men,” Daidara-bō, and Deedarabotchi are comparable in function, not identical in name, place, or recorded setting.

Traces Before a Face

Early collections usually say little about Daidarabotchi’s face, hair, or clothing. They present the hollows, springs, ponds, mounds, and mountains he supposedly left behind. Modern images of a long-haired giant in rough clothing, with a staff or mountain, assemble elements from separate local accounts into one body. A staff represents the Senzoku and Koike variants effectively, but it is not a shared attribute of the ancient giants of Hitachi and Harima.

Daidarabotchi therefore differs from an encounter-type giant like Mikoshi Nyūdō, met on the road and said to grow as a traveler looks upward. Mikoshi Nyūdō stories focus on a face-to-face encounter; in many Daidarabotchi stories, the giant has already gone, leaving terrain that suggests a body too large for it.

Several Origins at One Pond

At least two giant accounts overlap at Senzoku Pond: the 1919 record calls it a staff mark, while the account printed in 1983 calls it the mark of urination and gives Koike Pond the staff-hole role. Once dates and arrangements are distinguished, they are not mutually exclusive claims but variants retelling the same terrain through different actions.

Musashino’s low ground, bowl-shaped slopes, raised hills, springs, direction toward the sea, and distant Mount Fuji were recast as feet, staff, hands, and excretion. Tradition is not a survey map. Still, joining separated place names and small landforms to one body lets these stories work as “story maps” that share the character of the land. Daidarabotchi is less a monster with a fixed appearance than a giant repeatedly outlined by the contours of the landscape.