Tōno Folktale Museum (とおの物語の館)

Quick Facts

Type

Museum

Prefecture

Iwate · Tōno

Nearest station

Tōno Station (JR Kamaishi Line)

From the station

About eight minutes on foot

English signage

some

Opening hours and admission

See the official site · information checked on 2026-11-05

Hours, admission and closing days change, and this site does not list them. The link goes to the place's own page, with the date we last checked it.

What is there

Eight minutes from the station, in the old merchant quarter, a former sake brewery has been made into the Tale Storehouse, where the stories of the valley are played in sound and film in the dark between the beams. Beside it stand two houses moved here for the folklorist who wrote them down in 1910: the Takazen inn where he lodged while he listened, later used by other scholars and now a registered cultural property, and the small house of his retirement, brought from a Tokyo suburb. The hall called Tōno-za is the reason to come at a fixed hour: local storytellers sit on the stage and tell the old tales in the dialect of the basin, which few visitors follow word for word and all of them follow in the telling. The place opened in 1986 as the Folktale Village and took its present name in 2013. A joint ticket covers the castle-town museum a street away.

Why here

The tales told here are the ones of the 1910 collection: the house spirit that leaves a family before its ruin, the kappa of the rivers, the mountain women met by hunters, the tengu of the peaks. They came to the folklorist by word of mouth from a young man of the town, and the storytellers on the stage are the same line of telling continued, which is the one thing the museum across town cannot show.

Yokai you will meet

Zashiki-warashi 座敷童子 — The house spirit of the Tōno tales, told on the stage in the dialect of the houses it lived in.
Kappa 河童 — The kappa of the Tōno rivers, in the tales of the storehouse and the storytellers.
Yamauba 山姥 — The mountain women of the hunters' tales, told here as they were told to the folklorist.
Tengu 天狗 — The tengu of the high peaks around the basin, among the tales of the storytellers.

In manga: Tono Monogatari

Getting there

Tōno Station (JR Kamaishi Line). About eight minutes on foot.

Sources and further reading

Reliable secondary Tōno Folktale Museum Tōno Tourism Association (Tōno Jikan) The Tale Storehouse, the Yanagita Kunio exhibition house and the Tōno-za storytelling hall; access from Tōno station.

Database Tōno Folktale Museum (とおの物語の館) Wikipedia (Japanese) Opened 1986 as the Folktale Village, renamed 2013; the former Takazen inn and the folklorist's retirement house moved to the site.

Primary text Tōno Monogatari (遠野物語) Yanagita Kunio (1910); Aozora Bunko edition Tale 17 records a spirit of old Tōno houses often seen as a child of about twelve or thirteen, sounds in an empty room, and prosperity tied to the spirit's presence.

Other places with these yokai

Tōno Municipal Museum 遠野市立博物館 Museum Tōno, Iwate — Zashiki-warashi, Kappa, Yamauba, Tengu

Denshōen 伝承園 Museum Tōno, Iwate — Zashiki-warashi, Kappa

Fukusaki: Yanagita Kunio's Birthplace and the Yokai Benches 福崎町（柳田國男・松岡家記念館と妖怪ベンチ） Site Fukusaki, Hyōgo — Kappa, Tengu

Mizuki Shigeru Road 水木しげるロード Street Sakaiminato, Tottori — Kappa, Tengu

Yokai Yashiki at Ōboke 妖怪屋敷と石の博物館（道の駅大歩危） Museum Miyoshi (Yamashiro), Tokushima — Yamauba, Tengu

Kappa-buchi and Jōkenji カッパ淵と常堅寺 Site Tōno, Iwate — Kappa

Ryokufusō, the Inn of the Zashiki-warashi 緑風荘（座敷わらしの宿） Site Ninohe (Kindaichi Onsen), Iwate — Zashiki-warashi

Kashōzan Mirokuji 迦葉山弥勒寺 Shrine or temple Numata, Gunma — Tengu

Takaosan Yakuōin 高尾山薬王院 Shrine or temple Hachiōji, Tokyo — Tengu

Daiyūzan Saijōji 大雄山最乗寺 Shrine or temple Minamiashigara, Kanagawa — Tengu

Kinasa Folk Museum and the Demon Woman Momiji 鬼無里ふるさと資料館と鬼女紅葉の里 Museum Nagano (Kinasa), Nagano — Yamauba

Kurama-dera 鞍馬寺 Shrine or temple Kyoto (Sakyō), Kyoto — Tengu

Yokai Art Museum, Shōdoshima 妖怪美術館（小豆島） Museum Tonoshō, Shōdoshima, Kagawa — Kappa

Tanushimaru Station, the Kappa Station 田主丸駅（河童駅舎） Site Kurume (Tanushimaru), Fukuoka — Kappa

Kurume Suitengū 久留米水天宮（全国総本宮） Shrine or temple Kurume, Fukuoka — Kappa

The Kappa Landing Stone at Yatsushiro 河童渡来之碑（徳渕の津） Site Yatsushiro, Kumamoto — Kappa

Other places in Iwate

Kappa-buchi and Jōkenji カッパ淵と常堅寺 Site Tōno, Iwate — A quiet pool on a stream behind a temple in Tōno, the place the town points to when it tells its kappa tales.

Denshōen 伝承園 Museum Tōno, Iwate — A folk park built around an old L-shaped farmhouse, with a hall of a thousand silkworm deities and a room for the storyteller whose tales became Tōno Monogatari.

Tōno Municipal Museum 遠野市立博物館 Museum Tōno, Iwate — The town museum of the valley whose tales were written down in 1910, with the oshira-sama, the kappa and the storytellers of Tōno Monogatari.

Mitsuishi Shrine and the Oni's Handprints 三ツ石神社（鬼の手形） Shrine or temple Morioka, Iwate — Three granite boulders in a city grove where an oni pressed its hands into the rock as an oath, and gave the prefecture its name.

Ryokufusō, the Inn of the Zashiki-warashi 緑風荘（座敷わらしの宿） Site Ninohe (Kindaichi Onsen), Iwate — A hot-spring inn at the far end of a small spa village, where a house spirit called Kamemaro is said to have lived in the inner room for six hundred years.