Kappa (mythology)
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Kappa (mythology)
A — also known as , , with a boss called or – is a reptiloid ''kami'' with similarities to ''yōkai'' found in traditional Japanese folklore. ''Kappa'' can become harmful when they are not respected as gods. They are typically depicted as green, human-like beings with webbed hands and feet and a turtle-like carapace on their back. The ''kappa'' are known to favor cucumbers and love to engage in sumo wrestling. They are often accused of assaulting humans in water and removing a mythical organ called the ''shirikodama'' from their victim's anus. Terminology The name ''kappa'' is a contraction of the words ''kawa'' (river) and ''wappa'', a variant form of 童 ''warawa'' (also ''warabe'') "child". Another translation of kappa is "water sprites". The ''kappa'' are also known regionally by at least eighty other names such as ''kawappa'', ''kawako'', ''kawatarō'', ''gawappa'', ''kōgo'', ''suitengu''., citing Ōno (1994), p. 14 It is also called ''kawauso'' 'otter', ''dang ...
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:Category:Japanese Words And Phrases
{{Commons Words and phrases by language Words Words A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ... Words ...
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Lafcadio Hearn
, born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (; el, Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χέρν, Patríkios Lefkádios Chérn, Irish language, Irish: Pádraig Lafcadio O'hEarain), was an Irish people, Irish-Greeks, Greek-Japanese people, Japanese writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the Western world, West. His writings offered unprecedented insight into Japanese culture, especially his collections of Japanese mythology, legends and kwaidan, ghost stories, such as ''Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things''. Before moving to Japan and becoming a Japanese citizen, he worked as a journalist in the United States, primarily in Cincinnati and New Orleans. His writings about New Orleans, based on his decade-long stay there, are also well-known. Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkada, after which a complex series of conflicts and events led to his being moved to Dublin, where he was abandoned first by his mother, then his father, and f ...
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Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ... of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; Flora of Japan, flora and Wildlife of Japan#Fauna, fauna; and Shunga, erotica. The term translates as "picture[s] of the floating world". In 1603, the city of Edo (Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The ''chōnin'' class (merchants, craftsmen and workers), positioned at the bottom of Four occupations, the social order, benefited the most from the city's rapid economic growth, and began to indulge in and patronise the entertainment o ...
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Utamakura (Utamaro)
''Utamakura'' (, "poem of the pillow") is the title of a 12-print illustrated book of sexually explicit ''shunga'' pictures, published in 1788. The print designs are attributed to the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro, and the book's publication to Tsutaya Jūzaburō. Background Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the 17th to 19th centuries, and took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the "floating world" lifestyle of the pleasure districts. Alongside paintings, mass-produced woodblock prints were a major form of the genre. In the mid-18th century full-colour ' prints became common, printed using a large number of woodblocks, one for each colour. Kitagawa Utamaro (–1806) began designing prints in the 1770s; made his name in the 1790s with his ''bijin ōkubi-e'' ("large-headed pictures of beautiful women") portraits, focusing on the head and upper torso. He experimented with line, colour, and printing ...
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Utamaro
Kitagawa Utamaro ( ja, 喜多川 歌麿;  – 31 October 1806) was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his ''bijin ōkubi-e'' "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. Little is known of Utamaro's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later. Utamaro's work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the Eu ...
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Katsushika Hokusai
, known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series '' Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'', which includes the iconic print ''The Great Wave off Kanagawa''. Hokusai was instrumental in developing ''ukiyo-e'' from a style of portraiture largely focused on courtesans and actors into a much broader style of art that focused on landscapes, plants, and animals. Hokusai created the monumental ''Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'' as a response to a domestic travel boom in Japan and as part of a personal interest in Mount Fuji. It was this series, specifically, ''The Great Wave off Kanagawa'' and ''Fine Wind, Clear Morning'', that secured his fame both in Japan and overseas. Hokusai was best known for his woodblock ukiyo-e prints, but he worked in a variety of mediums including painting and book illustration. Starting as a young child, he continued working and improving his style u ...
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International Research Center For Japanese Studies
The , or Nichibunken (日文研), is an inter-university research institute in Kyoto. Along with the National Institute of Japanese Literature, the National Museum of Japanese History, and the National Museum of Ethnology, it is one of the National Institutes for the Humanities. The center is devoted to research related to Japanese culture. History The official origins of the institute are traced to an early study carried out by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture in 1982 on "methods of comprehensive research on Japanese culture". After surveying the field of Japanese studies for several years, the ministry, under the administration of Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, established the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in 1987 in Kyoto with the prominent philosopher Umehara Takeshi as its first Director-General. Prominent Kyoto academics Umesao Nobuo and Kuwabara Takeo also played key roles in the founding of the center. In 1990 the ce ...
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Hyōsube
Hyōsube () is a Japanese yōkai. There are legends about them in many areas such as Saga Prefecture and Miyazaki Prefecture. It is a child-sized river monster from Kyūshū that lives in underwater caves. It prefers to come out at night and loves to eat eggplants. It is a cousin of the supernatural yōkai in kappa folklore. Origin They are said to be the companions of kappa, and they have alternate names of kappa and gawappa in the Saga Prefecture and gaataro in the Nagasaki Prefecture, but it is also said that legends about them are even older than ones about kappa. They are said to have originated from Binzhushen (兵主神), the later name for Chiyou, and there are considered to be legends of them together with the Hata clan among other returnees. Originally revered as battle gods, in Japan they eventually came to acquire faith as food gods, and they are currently enshrined in places like Yasu, Shiga Prefecture and Tanba, Hyōgo Prefecture where there are shrines called H ...
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Wakan Sansai Zue
The is an illustrated Japanese ''leishu'' encyclopedia published in 1712 in the Edo period. It consists of 105 volumes in 81 books. Its compiler was Terashima or Terajima (), a doctor from Osaka. It describes and illustrates various activities of daily life, such as carpentry and fishing, as well as plants and animals, and constellations. It depicts the people of "different/strange lands" (''ikoku'') and "outer barbarian peoples". As seen from the title of the book ( wa , which means Japan, and kan , which means China), Terajima's idea was based on a Chinese encyclopedia, specifically the Ming work ''Sancai Tuhui'' ("Pictorial..." or "Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers") by Wang Qi (1607), known in Japan as the . Reproductions of the ''Wakan Sansai Zue'' are still in print in Japan. References External links Scansof the pages are available in thof the National Diet Library, Japan.Samples on the human body from the Japanese encyclopedia* Scans of copies from the ...
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Fish
Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of living fish species are ray-finned fish, belonging to the class Actinopterygii, with around 99% of those being teleosts. The earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts. Fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era, diversifying into a wide variety of forms. Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor that protected them from predators. The first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many (such as sharks) became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Mos ...
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River
A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of water. Small rivers can be referred to using names such as Stream#Creek, creek, Stream#Brook, brook, rivulet, and rill. There are no official definitions for the generic term river as applied to Geographical feature, geographic features, although in some countries or communities a stream is defined by its size. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location; examples are "run" in some parts of the United States, "Burn (landform), burn" in Scotland and northeast England, and "beck" in northern England. Sometimes a river is defined as being larger than a creek, but not always: the language is vague. Rivers are part of the water cycle. Water generally collects in a river from Precipitation (meteorology), precipitation through a ...
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Pond
A pond is an area filled with water, either natural or artificial, that is smaller than a lake. Defining them to be less than in area, less than deep, and with less than 30% emergent vegetation helps in distinguishing their ecology from that of lakes and wetlands.Clegg, J. (1986). Observer's Book of Pond Life. Frederick Warne, London Ponds can be created by a wide variety of natural processes (e.g. on floodplains as cutoff river channels, by glacial processes, by peatland formation, in coastal dune systems, by beavers), or they can simply be isolated depressions (such as a kettle hole, vernal pool, prairie pothole, or simply natural undulations in undrained land) filled by runoff, groundwater, or precipitation, or all three of these. They can be further divided into four zones: vegetation zone, open water, bottom mud and surface film. The size and depth of ponds often varies greatly with the time of year; many ponds are produced by spring flooding from rivers. Ponds may be ...
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