The Hammer’s Spawn

Tsuchinoko literally translates to “hammer’s spawn” but I’m not really sure as to why. It doesn’t look like a hammer at all! It is a legendary snake like creature and is also known as “bachi hebi” in some areas. The tsuchinoko is described as being 30-80cm in length with a central girth much larger than its head or tail. It kind of looks like a short snake that hasn’t quite finished digesting its last meal.

It is said to have fangs as well as venom, similar to a viper. Some also claim the legendary snake can jump up to a meter in distance. What’s scarier than a venomous snake? A venomous snake that can also jump at you. Terrifying.

It is believed that some of these tsuchinoko are capable of speech and have a tendency to lie. They also have a taste for alcohol apparently. Some will bite their own tail and roll like a hoop, similar to the Greek uroboros or a hoop snake, a legendary creature in the US, Canada, and Australia.

Some reports claim that the tsuchinoko can chirp or squeak (as well as or instead of speaking), and most agree that they have a distinct neck with black, grey, or brown scaly skin. The earliest records of these (as with many Japanese things) show up in the Kojiki, the oldest surviving book in Japan. These records date back to the 7th century.

Grand Hunts for Tsuchinoko

Since the 7th century, people have been on an endless hunt for this fabled creature. Many have claimed to have found, caught, or seen one, and there are plenty of tsuchinoko pictures and videos out there floating around the internet.

One of the more recent widespread searches for the beast came about in the year 2000. People flocked to Yoshii, Okayama to hunt the thing due to a 20 million yen (~$205,000) reward offered by the local government.

It all started when a farmer thought he spotted one while cutting grass. He described what he saw as a snake like creature with a face like Doraemon (talk about creepy). The farmer hit the beast with his weed whacker, but the crafty thing managed to escape. Crikey!

A few days later, an elderly woman spotted what she thought was a tsuchinoko by a stream. Instead of showing anyone her find or investigating further, she just buried the thing. Eventually, word got out of what the woman had done so the local government sent out a team to dig up the creature and send its remains over to the local university for examination.

The professor who analyzed the thing said that it may indeed have been a tsuchinoko, but “scientifically speaking, it was a kind of snake.” From the sound of it the remains must have been pretty out of sorts for this to be the only result of the investigation. Scientifically determining that it was in fact some sort of snake creature? How illuminating! So much for that.

Another old lady said she saw one the following month.

I was surprised. I just pointed at it and asked ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ It didn’t answer me, but just stared. It had a round face and didn’t take its eyes off me. I can still see the eyes now. They were big and round and it looked like they were floating on the water. I’ve lived over 80 years, but I’d never seen anything like that in my life.

There have been numerous events with rewards offered for the capture of a tsuchinoko, but so far, no one has collected. From what I can tell, the largest posted reward was 100 million yen (about $1,000,000). That’s a lot of money, so it’s no wonder people come out to search for them.

Tsuchinoko hunts are probably great advertising strategies to attract tourists though. Want more people to come to your town and give you money for various goods and services? Have a tsuchinoko “sighting” and offer up an outrageous reward! People will be sure to flock to the area in droves.

Just a Case of Mistaken Identity?

So if there have been so many hunts over the years, why hasn’t anyone found a real live tsuchinoko yet? Skeptics dismiss these creatures and their sightings most often as a case of mistaken identity. Many believe that they are just sightings of snakes or caecilians in process of digesting a large meal, or perhaps even some sort of exotic lizard.

Regardless of whether or not the things are real, they continue to be popular to this day. Many replicas have been made of the tsuchinoko – everything from fancy display pieces to toys. They’ve also shown up in video games like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. They inspired the Pokemon Dunsparce. They’ve made appearances in visual novels, manga, and anime.

So even if the things aren’t real, they’re still very much a part of Japan’s myth culture. People are still going on hunts for them, and they’re still showing up in popular media. Considering the idea of them has been around since the 7th century, they’ll probably be around for a long time to come.

And then there’s also this music video entitled “Tsuchinoko” that has nothing to do with them. Still pretty cool though.

So what do you think about the tsuchinoko? Think it’s real? I feel like I have to side with the skeptics on this one. These things seem to be made up of a lot more fiction than fact.

On the other hand, what would you do if you met a talking snake creature drinking some sake?

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It’s no surprise then that people still to this day rely on folk medicine and medical myths to understand the human body. People still seem to think that carrots improve your vision (they don’t), Robitussin cures all ailments (Chris Rock said so!), and an apple a day keeps the doctor away (they’ll help your teeth tho).

Japan has its fair share of medical myths, but do these myths have any basis in reality at all, or are they simply made up?

I thought in this post I could act as a kind of Japanese mythbuster — just think of me like a younger, more Asian Adam Savage. Kuu, our office cat, could be Jamie and I guess Koichi is Kari Byron? I didn’t think this through very far.

Needlessly complicated analogies aside, the Japanese myth I want to take a look at is the idea that the temperature of your stomach has a huge bearing on your overall general health. The Japanese are really, really concerned about the temperature of your stomach. If you’re feeling sick, it’s probably because your stomach is too cold.

You can see bits and pieces of this myth in Koichi’s post from earlier this week, where he talked about starting a vegetarian Buddhist diet. He quotes one Japanese chef about the different qualities of each food:

Summer vegetables from the melon family, such as tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers, have a cooling effect on the body. Fall provides and abundant harvest of sweet potatoes, yams, pumpkins and fruit, which revive tired bodies after the heat of summer. In winter, a variety of root vegetables, such as daikon radish, turnip and lotus root, provide warmth and sustenance.

It’s not exactly that this idea of different foods giving different effects on the body is exactly unique to Japan, but I think it takes it beyond what a lot of us are used to. I mean sure, cucumbers are especially refreshing in the summertime, but I don’t know that I’d say that a food has a reviving effect on tired bodies or a warming effect unless the food is, y’know, warm.

The myth of the cold stomach doesn’t stop with the effects of various foods on your stomach. In the wintertime lots of people strap haramaki, little stomach warmers, onto themselves to keep their core nice and toasty. Beyond keeping you warm, haramaki supposedly have other benefits, like helping you process alcohol more quickly. (I talked about all of the benefits of a haramaki in a post I wrote last year.)

To some extent though, keeping the core warm isn’t really a foreign concept in the west. What is it that really makes this a uniquely Japanese myth?

The nail in the coffin for me is that even Japanese medical doctors seem to take this myth to heart and make diagnoses based on it. In one of our earlier posts, one commentor recalled how when he was sick in Japan, the doctors said the same thing:

my stomach was “too cold” because I drank chilled drinks. Mind you, this was August so I’m not sure how I was supposed to survive without regularly drinking cold liquids, but they were convinced this was the cause.

I tried to appease them, but a lifetime of drinking whatever I wanted without gastrointestinal distress convinced me they were full of it so I just stopped asking them what to do. Eventually my condition went away on its own.

It’s more than a little concerning when medical professionals seem to buy into a myth, but maybe it makes more sense if it were actually real.

Given all of the mythos about cold stomachs, is there any truth in there? Does consuming cold food and drink actually make your stomach colder and subsquently, make you sick?

In my very basic research, I couldn’t find any scientific research to support this claim. I read a lot of different anecdotal evidence and half-baked hypotheses, including an argument that colder substances sap energy from your body to warm them up.

Ultimately though, none of the stories or hypotheses were really backed up with any scientific studies or data. There definitely seemed to be a widespread cultural distrust of consuming cold things (I found one article in the New York Times about how much Russians hate ice cubes), but couldn’t come across any scientific basis for it.

I found one, kind of related topic; one radio show questioned whether cold or hot beverages were better for cooling you off in the summer. The expert they brought onto the show, a medical doctor and professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said that any differences in temperature once the drinks were consumed were more or less negligible.

Given all this lack of evidence, I think it’s pretty safe to say that eating or drinking something cold won’t have make you sick. If you have sensitive teeth, it might be a bit of a problem, or if you consume it too quickly, you might get brain freeze, but that seems to be about the extent of it.