The Kappa is not properly a sea goblin, but a river goblin, and haunts the sea only in the neighborhood of river mouths.
Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Volume II
In The Book of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster describes an experiment by the Japanese folklorist Ito Ryuhei, who once asked his students to draw three well-known yokai1, including the kappa. All of the students drew the same kappa: “a small, cute creature, a head with hair surrounding a saucer, a beak and webbed hands and feet, and a shell on its back.”
If you take out the saucer surrounded by hair, that description fits the Pokémon Squirtle, a small, cute turtle who is the third and final starting Pokémon in the original Game Boy games. Professor Ito’s classroom exercise, intended to demonstrate the cultural ubiquity of yokai, also helps illustrate a specific facet of this ubiquity: the kappa’s influence on this most famous of Pokémon. This post, then, will connect Squirtle to the kappa, focusing on its appearance and its elemental connection to water.
Squirtle is not the only Pokémon modeled after the kappa. According to the Red and Blue Pokédex, Psyduck’s evolved form Golduck “is often mistaken for the Japanese monster, kappa.” The 3rd generation family of Lotard, Lombre and Ludiculo also take after the kappa, as does the 9th generation Pokémon Capsakid.
I will leave discussions of both these Pokémon and Squirtle’s evolved forms for future posts. Instead of the kappa, Wartortle and Blastoise take after other fantastical creatures: the legendarily long-lived turtle minogame in the case of the former and the popular kaiju Gamera in the case of the latter.
Our Squirtle genealogy begins in Ito’s classroom.
Ito’s students reproduced a very familiar character: the kawaii kappa of advertising and pop culture. In Japan, one can dine at Kappa Sushi (the country’s fourth largest sushi chain), drink Kappa sake, eat Kappa Ebisen shrimp snacks and buy Kappa Kappa pencil cases. (I’m sure that Kappa Sushi’s menu includes the rice and cucumber sushi roll known as a kappamaki or kappa roll, which is named after the mythical creature’s fondness for cucumbers.) As Foster writes in a 1998 Asian Folklore Studies article, “the kappa has become primarily a commercial icon.”2
This iconic status also makes it an obvious choice to represent cities and towns in a culture of kawaii civic and corporate mascots (Yuru-chara.) In his article, Foster describes the kappa’s prominence as the mascot of Imagawa, Fukuoka prefecture, which has named both its train station and its post office after the creature; a kappa statue at the station welcomes visitors to town. Other Japanese cities and towns with kappa mascots include:
Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, represented by Kappa Green;
Fukusai, Hyōgo Prefecture, represented by the guitar-playing kappa Gajiro;
Hashimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, represented by Hashibou;
Shiki, Saitama Prefecture, represented by Kapal;
Tokyo’s Sumida Ward, represented by Kappa Kotarou; and
Tono, Iwate Prefecture, represented by the husband and wife kappa team of Karin-Chan and Kuririn-Chan.
The latter took home first prize at the 2018 Yuru-Chara Grand Prix, becoming Japan’s character mascot of the year.
For Foster, the modern kappa has transcended its origins in regional folklore to become a symbol not just of specific towns but of rural Japan in general. Its countryside roots make it a natural symbol for environmental project, a kind of Japanese analogue of Smokey Bear; Foster mentions “cutesified kappa images posted near rivers, imploring people not to litter or spoil the environment.”
The modern, commercial kappa is also a multimedia star, from the sixties manga Sanpei the Kappa to the manga and anime InuYasha to the animated film Summer Days with Coo (2007) and the cheesy kaiju movie Death Kappa (2010). Video game descendants include the Koopa Troopas so frequently victimized by the Mario brothers, Zoras in The Legend of Zelda (especially the earlier games), the ferryman Kapp’n in Animal Crossing and, of course, the previously mentioned Pokémon.
The Japanese folklorist Kagawa Masanobu credits this modern, cute kappa to a fifties “kappa boom” catalyzed by the manga artist Shimizu Kon, whose hit series Kappa kawatarō and Kappa tengoku (Kappa Heaven) codified the kappa as a cute, child-friendly creature.
Squirtle’s immediate ancestors, then, are the often very turtle-like kappa of contemporary Japanese culture. What about their mythical common ancestor?
If Squirtle, a half-dozen other Pokémon, Koopa Troopas, and the various mascots we’ve discussed all take after the same mythical creature, what do they tell us about that original creature?
First, it obviously inhabits lakes and rivers, as represented by the aforementioned anti-littering campaign and various Squirtle TCG illustrations. Whether swimming, as in the Team Rocket card, or standing atop a rock formation by a lake, as in the Base Set card, or relaxing by a riverside, as in a Japanese vending machine card, Squirtle lives where land and freshwater meet.
It is also, importantly, a rural creature; there are no buildings, vehicles, or any other signs of human technology or activity visible in the background of any of these cards.
It has webbed hands and feet and can both swim and walk, as also illustrated in the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Water is not just its habitat; if the pure water-type Squirtle is any indication, it has something of an intrinsic, elemental connection to water.
It is probably a mischievous creature, if the anime Squirtle is any indication; Ash’s Squirtle is a prankster and leader of a gang of juvenile delinquents before it joins Ash’s party.
It is probably smaller than a human being, certainly not a giant monster, not a kaiju.
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“Generally speaking,” Foster writes in The Book of Yokai,
The kappa is thought of as scaly or slimy, greenish in color, with webbed feet and hands, and a carapace on its back. Sometimes it resembles a monkey, sometimes a giant frog or turtle. It is the size of a young child but disproportionately strong.
The word itself probably comes from a combination of the words kawa (“river”) and warabe (“child”) and the creature’s modern image likewise comes from merging two previously existing creatures: the slimy, shelled kappa of eastern Japanese folklore and the monkeylike kawataro (“river child”) of western Japanese folklore.3 The yokai artist and bestiarist Toriyama Sekien, mentioned in the introduction to this series, helped create the modern kappa by combining these two similar creatures into one.
As Foster emphasizes, “kappa” is to some extent an umbrella term for a family of similar creatures, each said to inhabit a particular local lake or river. Japan had/has more than eighty local kappa legends from across the country and at least a dozen names for the creatures.4
The above illustration demonstrates the sheer diversity of kappa even decades after Sekien’s bestiaries. Some of these creatures have turtle shells on their backs, but some do not. Most are green with slimy or scaly skin, but three are hairy and clay-colored and a few have both slimy green skin and body hair. While most are bipedal, two walk or crawl on all fours. One at top-center could almost be a real turtle, while others bear closer resemblances to monkeys or even human beings.
While a full cultural history of the kappa would take up not just a newsletter but an entire book, I think I should at least briefly consider the origins of this creature. Why do towns and villages across Japan have local legends of little aquatic humanoid creatures?
As with many (possibly most) mythical creatures, there are multiple pieces to this puzzle. The influential scholar Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962)5 proposed a general theory of yokai relevant to the kappa. Kunio describes yokai as “degraded kami,” as former local nature gods that survived in folk belief as monsters and tricksters after they stopped being actively worshipped.6 Foster and others have suggested that kappa originated as local suijin, or Shinto water deities associated with agriculture and fertility; this origin story is supported by the tradition of giving cucumbers as offerings to kappa, a practice that persists at the Sōgen temple in contemporary Tokyo.
Another theory posits that the child-sized, big-headed creatures represent a folk memory of a time when the bodies of stillborn children were disposed of in lakes and rivers, or even of a time when unwanted children were drowned in those waters. Is the kappa a distant, distorted image of those small bodies floating down the river?
A third and final piece of the puzzle is more prosaic: the kappa as an embodiment of the very real dangers of drowning. “Kappa,” Masanobu writes, “were invented to caution against carelessness;” he notes that contemporary Japanese “no swimming” signs often contain images of kappa, albeit the modern kawaii versions. This origin as a cautionary creature — embodying the dangers of lakes and rivers in the same way that the talking wolf encountered by Little Red Riding embodies the dangers of wandering into the woods — helps explain the prevalence of the kappa across Japan. One imagines parents in many different towns and villages inventing a water monster to add edge to warnings about swimming unsupervised in the local river.
Drowning is a common feature of kappa legends. In some areas of Japan, kappa are known as komahiki or “horse pullers” because of stories about them pulling horses (and sometimes cattle) down to a watery death. In other stories, kappa act on their craving for human livers by drowning both children and adults. A monster’s muscular arms pulling you under the surface — the kappa is a vivid mythicization of real dangers that would stick in a child’s imagination.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell discusses an archetypal character called the threshold guardian, who will appear in future installments of this series. In brief, this character guards the boundaries between the familiar human world and unknown wild world beyond it. One obvious cross-cultural example would be ghosts, which are invariably said to haunt places set off from normal life: ancient ruins, abandoned buildings, old mines, dense forests, thick swamps, remote moors, graveyards.
The kappa functions as a guardian of the threshold between land and water, a genius loci, an unseen danger lurking literally just below the surface. This could reflect some spiritual or religious sense of the water as a life-giving natural force, as suggested by the degraded kami theory, a folk memory of the water as a place haunted by death of children, a reasonable fear of drowning in deep water or strong currents, or, perhaps most likely, some combination of all of these. In any case, the kappa embodies the water as a powerful force to be feared and respected, an elemental connection with a distant echo in Squirtle’s elemental powers.
Despite their major differences, all of the kappa depicted in the Illustrated Guide to 12 Types of Kappa have one feature in common: a bowl-like indentation on the top of their heads, which holds the water that serves as their life force, their superpower. Spilling that water causes them to lose their strength.7
As with the kappa’s starring role in cautionary tales, there is again a close link between the kappa’s physical strength and water. It doesn’t just live in water; it represents the water’s destructive potential reimagined as a little monster.
Starting with the original 151, water Pokémon tend to be Pokémonized versions of real aquatic animals; Squirtle and its family live alongside ducks, jellyfish, seals, dugongs, oysters, crabs and seahorses in the original games’ aquatic ecosystem.8 For most of these Pokémon, their elemental type simplify reflects their real-world habitat.
Squirtle’s mythic ancestry, on the other hand, makes its elemental powers more than just a case of slotting the creature into a pre-existing elemental type system. Squirtle’s ability to attack its enemies with water provides a distant echo of a creature that embodied a fear of water’s dangers (and perhaps also an awe, a respect for how it causes both life and death.) In a literal and gamified way, attacks like Water Gun and Hydro Pump connect Squirtle to its mythic roots, as does one of its most memorable anime appearances.
In “Pokémon Shipwreck,” a pastiche of naval disaster movies like Titanic (1997) and especially The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the protagonists – and Team Rocket – are trapped inside a sunken ship. After Ash’s Charmander burns a hole through the ship’s hull, Ash and Pikachu tie themselves to Squirtle, a strong swimmer who carries them to the ocean’s surface.
On one level, this scene dramatizes basic Pokémon gameplay just as the anime Charizard’s fragility reflects starter Pokémon’s lack of hit points in the early game. Squirtle, like all water-type Pokémon, can learn Surf, a powerful attack in battle and a way to travel across bodies of water in the overworld. However, it also offers an undoubtedly unintentional inversion of kappa folklore: Squirtle as an anti-kappa, saving people from drowning rather than dragging them down to the bottom.
This image of an anti-kappa speaks to the central Pokémon metaphor of controlling monsters;9 Ash using his Pokémon’s special abilities to save himself from a dangerous situation is a step on his hero’s journey towards self-actualization.
In this scene, as elsewhere, Squirtle represents the kawaii, commercialized, unthreatening, controllable kappa. But, to use a shipwreck-related metaphor, it also represents the tip of an iceberg that does extend down to the murky depths of myth and legend.
An umbrella term for Japanese mythical and/or supernatural creatures.
Foster, Michael Dylan. “The Metamorphosis of the Kappa: Transformation of Folklore to Folklorism in Japan.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57., no.1 (1998).
Foster, The Book of Yokai.
The local nature of kappa legends helped fuel their adoption as civic mascots.
His foundational work earned him the honorific of “father of Japanese folklore studies.”
Quoted in Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Folklore Studies in the 21st Century, edited by Ronald A Morse and Christian Goehlert.
According to folk tales, this means that one can defend oneself against a threatening kappa by challenging it to a sumo match, which must begin with a ceremonial (and water-spilling) bow.
Future games expanded this ecosystem to include anglerfish, octopi, manta rays, sharks, whales, penguins, otters, barracuda and many others.
Pokémon cocreator Satoshi Tajiri speaks of “the monster within yourself, [representing] fear or anger” in a 1999 TIME Magazine interview.
I'm reminded of Sigmund the Sea Monster. (If that doesn't scream "child of the 70s" I don't know what)
I heard that Gamefreak wanted the (Kanto) starters to feel like pets or companions kids could imagine finding in their backyards or nearby nature. So the starters, or at least their first evolution, are not meant to evoke mythological creatures but more mundane animals like a toad (bulbasaur), lizard (charmander), and turtle (squirtle). (Though the chosen type and final evolutions are likely influenced by mythology).