Kodama (木霊): The Spirit in the Old Tree, and the Echo That Answers

What is Kodama?

Before you cut down a tree more than a hundred years old, you cut a small branch from it first and lay the branch across another tree. Then the old tree can be felled. The branch is for whatever was living in it, so that it has somewhere to go. The act is called kodama-nuki — “drawing out the kodama” — and where a branch was not used, a nandina was planted beside the tree instead, for the same purpose.

That is the kodama at its most concrete: not a creature you meet, but a presence you make room for before you change something old. The rite was still being described in the 1950s.

What does kodama mean?

The word is written 木霊 or 木魂: ko, a tree, and dama, a spirit or soul. A kodama is the spirit of a tree.

It is also, in ordinary modern Japanese, the word for an echo. Call into a valley and the voice that comes back is a kodama. The two meanings are one: the sound returning from the mountainside was understood as the tree spirit answering, and the name for the spirit became the name for the reply. A related word, yamabiko — the mountain echo — covers neighbouring ground without being the same thing.

So the kodama is not only something that lives in the forest. It is the forest speaking back.

Appearance

There is no single one, and the oldest idea needs none: the presence is inside the tree, and the tree — its age, its size, the shape of its roots and trunk — is all that is ever seen. An echo reveals it by sound.

In 1776 Toriyama Sekien put a plate titled Kodama into Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, his first picture book of yokai: human figures beside an ancient tree. It is one artist’s way of drawing a presence that has no body, and it is the beginning of a long habit of giving the kodama a face.

Our illustration keeps the older ambiguity. Moss, bark, shadow, and mist almost line up into a profile, and the tree has no literal eyes or mouth or limbs. Whether there is a figure in it depends on where you stand.

Behavior and abilities

• It lives in old trees. A remarkable tree is its home, or its body.
• It answers. The echo is its voice.
• It can be moved. A branch laid across another tree, or a nandina planted beside it, gives it somewhere to go before the axe.

It does not call your name, chase you through the woods, or strike down the woodcutter. The kodama of the rite is not angry. It is simply present, and owed a little courtesy.

One idea, many names

Across Japan, exceptional trees were understood to be inhabited, and dangerous to cut without acknowledgment. What lived in them, the gesture owed to it, and the cost of skipping the gesture all varied from valley to valley. Kodama is one word among several for a very widespread idea, and the branch laid across a neighbouring tree is one gesture among several.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

There is nothing to defeat. The kodama-nuki is a rite of respect performed before felling, not an exorcism performed after an attack. The human response is not to fight the forest but to acknowledge its age before changing it.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. A spirit of old trees, whose name is also the Japanese word for an echo; a rite, described in 1956, of cutting a small branch from a tree more than a hundred years old and laying it across another tree before felling, or planting a nandina to draw the spirit out; Sekien’s 1776 plate of human figures beside an ancient tree.

Later imagery. Animation, games, and illustration have given the kodama a body: small, pale, humanoid, gathering in groups in a glowing forest, sometimes rattling their heads. The design is now recognised around the world, and it belongs to specific modern works.

The older kodama is harder to see because there was never anything to see. There is an old tree. You call out, and something answers. Before you cut it down, you give it a branch to move into.