Kappa with A Side of Cucumber
I apologize for the long delay in getting this post up… I actually wrote half of it and then was distracted by my parents coming to visit from the states! Over Golden Week, I went to the cheap sushi chain known as Kappa Sushi (かっぱ寿司) for the first time. 
Now, if you’ve spent any amount of time in Japan, you’re probably either wondering how it took me this long, or more likely, why did I bother going at all? To answer the first, when I studied abroad in Japan, I didn’t eat fish, so sushi was basically out of the question. And when I came back to Japan on JET, I was placed in Hokkaido. Pretty sure there is no Kappa Sushi in Hokkaido. Our regular sushi isn’t much more expensive and infinitely better. As to why I even wasted my time and money? Because of their mascot and a kind of sushi called kappa-maki (河童巻き), or cucumber roll.
Kappa are river-dwelling yokai with a penchant for luring horses to their watery demise. Quite a bad habit for a creature living on an island country with no naturally wild horses! So, as you might expect, people got pretty pissed at these little guys for their pranks. But it didn’t end with horses… kappa also seem to enjoy Sumo wrestling, drowning little boys, pulling people’s entrails out as they took a bathroom break, and eating cucumber among many other things. This last one is what drew me to Kappa Sushi in Aomori over Golden Week.
Kappa Sushi is, other than the name of a crappy sushi restaurant, a kind of sushi in and of itself. It’s a cucumber roll, wrapped in rice and dried seaweed.
Since Japanese cucumber is about a billion times less bitter than the stuff you get in America, they’re not too bad. And really cheap! Originally, this sushi was made to appease kappa and stop them from killing horses and giving surprise prostate exams. Plus all that pesky riverside Sumo… In this, it’s kind of like another kind of sushi named after a slightly more divine creature. This sushi will be the topic of a later post.
Now, right after I said “a slightly more divine creature,” I reminded myself of an article I read in my college days which postulated quite intelligibly that kappa were once gods but had been reduced to mere monsters through human mistreatment of the rivers the kappa protected. Think of the stinky river god in Spirited Away. So, maybe we just got on their bad side so they’ve been reduced to Sumo wrestling on the beach. Oh, right… kappa like cucumber because it has a high water content. And water is important to river spirits.
今回の妖怪
The kappa (河童) was the focus of this week’s blog, so I’m gonna be lazy and make it this week’s yokai as well.
Kappa vary in shape and description depending on where you are in Japan, but the iconic kappa is kind of like a turtle with a bowl on its head. This bowl is filled with water and is the lifesource of the kappa. They are usually the size of adolescent humans and in addition to the bowl, have green skin, a shell, and a hooked beak. Their love of disembowelment and drowning has already been discussed so I’m afraid that’s all for the kappa today. There’s so much out there on these guys I’ll probably be revisiting them again one of these days.
My Yokai Monogatari 