Ippon-datara (Tokushima)

Ippon-datara (also Ippon-tatara) is a one-eyed, one-legged mountain figure recorded across western Japan, including the Iya region of Miyoshi (Tokushima) and the Kumano and Omine ranges of the Kii Peninsula. The typical narrative places it on a snowy pass on the night of the twentieth day of the twelfth lunar month, when travellers are said to encounter a towering one-eyed, one-legged shadow; the date is paired with a folk prohibition against entering the mountains. Yanagita Kunio's Hitotsume-Kozo Sonota (1934) discusses the figure in connection with the ancient ironworking deity Ame-no-Mahitotsu-no-Kami, reading the trait as a memory of mountain tatara smelting. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779) includes related single-leg, single-eye figures. Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and the Nichibunken database collect Kii, Shikoku, and Izumo cases. The figure is told as a tradition of the passes of the Tsurugi range in the Miyoshi mountains of Tokushima.