The story of Kyokushi Village

I created it with the motif of a traditional group handed down in the former Kyokushi village in Kumamoto prefecture where I spent my childhood. Kyokushi Village is a village where my father's parents' house is located, and I myself lived in during my childhood. It's a village with a good view, with a large field spread out, but I learned that there are many stories in that land, so I made it into a work.

(Center of screen) Onibi-taki is a traditional event that means to ward off evil.

(Right side of the screen) There was a land called Yunoyama where hot springs that are effective against all diseases spring up. At one point, a strange monk came there and put something like a cow's head in hot water and cast a spell, and something like that cow's head sprang out briskly somewhere. Then, the hot springs that had sprung up in Mount Yunoyama withered away, and hot springs sprang up in the distant city of Yamaga instead.

(Bottom of screen) There is a story about a large pond for irrigation at an altitude of 200m in the southeast of Yubune village. At one point, three villages at the foot of the mountain gathered and decided to build a large reservoir for paddy field irrigation. However, construction did not go well, and every time during the rainy season, the embankment collapsed due to rising water, and the Yubune village was flooded. It is said that people who have done their work finally decided to set up a human pillar, but they had trouble selecting people, and they had no choice but to divert the method used when selecting human pillars in the nearby coastal area and chose those who had torn kimonos covered with horizontal stripes of cloth. The person selected was the leader of the 10-person group (autonomous organization). The group leader stood at a crack in the embankment as a human pillar, covered it with soil while praying for completion of construction, and buried it.

(Left side of the picture) There was a wealthy man with 1,000 servants and 5,000 hectares of farmland. He tried to finish planting rice in that vast field in one day, but he couldn't finish in time and the sun started to set. So he lined up some of his strongest men at the edge of the field, gave them golden fans and had them fan the sun back up to a high place. He tried to finish planting rice before the sun went down again, but the men were exhausted and the sun finally set. So he spread oil on a nearby hill and set it on fire, and finished planting rice by light, but the embers turned into a fireball and burned down the wealthy man's house and storehouse. It is said that this fireball was the curse of a giant snake that lived on the hill that the wealthy man had set on fire.

Cited from:旭志村史