Umi-bōzu (海坊主): The Giant on a Calm Sea

What is Umi-bōzu?

Some years back, off the border of Awa and Tosa on the Pacific side of Shikoku, a boat’s crew saw something ahead of them on the water. It was about ten jō high — thirty metres or so — narrow at the top and spreading toward the base, like a great seated Buddha. There was a place that might have been a head, but nobody could make it out. It crossed the boat’s path five or six chō ahead, perhaps six hundred metres, and after a while it grew fainter and fainter and was gone.

The boatman knew what it was. That is the umi-bōzu, he said. It comes out on fine days when the sea is flat calm, and you hardly ever see it.

That is the whole of the account, preserved in Honchō Zokugenshi and quoted in the Edo essay collection Enkyo Zatsuwa, and the calm is the point of it. No storm, no wave, no attack. A perfectly ordinary day, and something the height of a temple walking across it.

What does umi-bōzu mean?

The name is written 海坊主: umi, the sea, and bōzu, a Buddhist monk — or, in everyday speech, anyone with a shaved head. The sea monk. The word describes a silhouette, a smooth rounded shape rising out of the water, and the Awa–Tosa witnesses reached for the same comparison when they said it was like a great Buddha.

It is a name that has been given to more than one thing.

Appearance

The Awa–Tosa account gives an outline and nothing inside it: very tall, narrow above and broad below, a head that could not be made out. No eyes, no mouth, no arms, no skin. Our illustration treats it as dark water, mist and reflected sky in roughly that shape, and refuses to sharpen it.

The smooth black head with glowing eyes that dominates modern pictures is not in that record. Nor is the one-eyed man, who belongs to a different story.

Behavior and abilities

• It appears in calm weather. Clear sky, no wind, flat water.
• It crosses, and it fades. It passes well ahead of the boat and thins into the air.
• It does nothing to the boat. No pursuit, no demand, no wave.

The other umi-bōzu behave differently. In the twelfth month, a boat making for harbour at Suō-Ōshima, in what is now Yamaguchi, met a headwind and then stopped dead on the water. A man with one eye tried to climb aboard out of the sea and asked the boatman, What in this world do you fear most? The boatman said, Making a living. The man vanished. That was told in 1930.

At Sago harbour on Tsushima, as recorded in 1983, the umi-bōzu comes to the boat and asks to borrow the akatori, the bailer, and threatens to sink the boat if refused. Lend it, and it bails the sea into the hull until the boat goes down. Some said it was the soul of a dead person. The fishermen enshrined Funadama-sama, the boat’s guardian, and prayed not to meet it.

One name, three creatures

Set the three side by side and they do not add up to one animal. The Awa–Tosa umi-bōzu is a sight — enormous, silent, distant, harmless. The Suō-Ōshima umi-bōzu is a passenger with a riddle. The Tsushima umi-bōzu is a voice with a request, and it is the same request the funayūrei make up and down the coast. Run them together and you get a thirty-metre figure that shrinks to a one-eyed man, asks for a bucket and sinks you, which is a sequence nobody ever reported.

What they share is a name for the thing that is wrong with the sea today.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

For the giant on the calm sea, none, and none needed — it passed, and that was all. For the Tsushima umi-bōzu the answer is the funayūrei’s answer: a bailer with the bottom knocked out, and Funadama-sama on the boat. For the one-eyed man off Suō-Ōshima the boatman found the only defence that story allows, which was to tell it the truth. What do you fear most? Earning a living. It had nothing to say to that.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. A roughly thirty-metre, Buddha-like form with no clear head crossing ahead of a boat on a clear, windless day off Awa–Tosa and fading (Honchō Zokugenshi, via Enkyo Zatsuwa); a one-eyed man who tried to board a becalmed boat at Suō-Ōshima and asked what the boatman feared most (1930); and a Tsushima umi-bōzu that borrows a bailer and sinks the boat with it, met by enshrining Funadama-sama (1983).

Later imagery. Modern art gives the umi-bōzu a vast round black head, glowing eyes, arms, sometimes tentacles, and the power to raise storms and crush ships. It is an effective monster, and it hides the strangest thing in the oldest account: the day was fine, the water was still, and something the size of a temple hall simply walked past.