Tokorozawa Azuki-arai Legend

The Tokorozawa azuki-arai legend belongs to the wider water-edge yokai tradition in which a presence at night is heard washing beans at streams and irrigation ditches. The onomatopoeia 'shall I grind azuki beans, or take a person?' is the standard phrasing, with the sound of beans washed in water and no visible figure. In the Tokorozawa area the cycle is set along the Yanase River and Azuma River, told to children as a warning to avoid the water at night. Variants attribute the sound to a kappa or tanuki, or treat azuki-arai-bozu as an independent yokai. The figure is widely distributed across Japan: in the Kanto region it links to tanuki and fox mischief, while in the Kinki and Chugoku regions it is treated as the work of water deities or child-figures. The cycle is a representative case of the yokai-isation of nocturnal sound. In Tokorozawa the variants follow the Yanase and Azuma rivers and extend to Higashimurayama, Sayama and Iruma, joining the wider water-edge yokai grouping of the valleys (yato) of northern Musashino. Documentary sources include the folklore volume of the Tokorozawa city history, the folklore volume of the Saitama prefectural history and Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi (1956); the visual canon was set in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, where the figure spread nationally.