TIME: Did you name all those beetles and spiders and bugs?
Tajiri: No. I had a cat, though. I wanted to name the frogs, because I watched them grow, but there were too many.
TIME: Are the Pokémon names related to those insects?
Tajiri: Yeah. Like Nyoromo [Poliwhirl in the U.S.]. It looks like a tadpole. There's little whirls on it because I remembered that when you pick up a tadpole, you can see its intestines because it's transparent.
I.
The past few posts in this series have involved journeys to distant regions of myth and history: the kappa-haunted lakes of Japanese folklore; the shrieking, simultaneously deadly and medicinal mandrake of the medieval herbal; the pairs of lions guarding palaces, temples and tombs across the world.
This post will cover Poliwag and its evolutions, Pokémon inspired by encounters literally much closer to home.
I will begin by summarizing one of the main roles that frogs — these Pokémon’s obvious inspiration — have played in mythology. As common animals found across the world, frogs have acquired a wealth of mythological association, from the plague of frogs besetting Egypt in the Book of Exodus to the Korean tale of the green frog, a fable about the need to obey one’s parents. I will focus on one main theme relevant to the world of Pokémon: frogs as shapeshifters in various mythology.
The second part of this post will cover the Poliwag family’s roots in Pokémon co-creator Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood experiences exploring his hometown’s rivers and ponds. Tajiri has identified Poliwhirl as his favorite Pokémon because of this nostalgic inspiration and I will use this autobiographical connection as the launching point for a discussion of Pokémon as — at least in some sense — a work as much about everyday encounters with nature as it is about mythopoeic fantasy.
One mythological theme is worth at least briefly discussing at the beginning of this post. Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath, like all Pokémon, fall under one of more than a dozen elemental types, in this case the element of Water. (Poliwrath, the final form1, is a Water/Fighting hybrid.) While some of these elemental powers are arbitrary or new inventions (Pikachu, the Electric Mouse Pokémon, does not draw on any history of mythical or folkloric electric mice), this is not the case of Poliwag and its evolutions. Frogs obviously spend their early lives in water and are capable of swimming even as adults; they have an intrinsic connection to the element, like many first generation Water Pokémon.
If we move from biology to mythology, we find that frogs can be true water elementals that control and embody the element rather than merely living in it. In southeast Asia, Jingyi Lin and Pathom Hongsuwan write in a recent International Journal of Religion article, “images of frogs and toads are intrinsically connected to nature and are associated with sacred or supernatural powers that control water and rain.”
These mythical associations, rather than being limited to southeast Asia, are common throughout the world — and throughout time. In some ancient Egyptian creation myths, for instance, the primordial watery chaos is ruled by a group of eight gods called the Ogdoad. The four males have the heads of frogs while the four females have the heads of snakes.
Frogs, Hope B. Werness writes in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art,
quite naturally are associated with water, and their growth stages and changing forms link them with the moon. The link with both the moon and water leads to their widespread association with birth, death, and rebirth in world mythology. Finally, because of their link with water and rain, frogs are associated with vegetation and agriculture.
Poliwag et al — which naturally learn Bubble, Water Gun, Rain Dance and Hydro Pump, and can be taught Water Pulse, Surf and Waterfall — represent modern takes on these mythical frogs. We will begin with these mythical ancestors.
II.
The word amphibian comes from Greek words meaning “life of both kinds” or “having two modes of existence.” Beginning life as tadpoles, they transform from legless swimming aquatic animals to four-legged frogs hopping across dry land. Frogs are liminal animals, with one webbed foot in the water and another on land: creatures crossing the boundary of two elements, of two worlds.
Frogs, then, are shapeshifters in mythology because they are shapeshifters and liminal beings in real life.
For most of my readers, the most familiar example of this motif comes from the Brothers Grimm tale “The Frog King, or Iron Henry.” In the story’s finale, the frustrated princess throws the frog against the wall, which causes him to transform back into a handsome prince. The prince explains that he had been turned into a frog and imprisoned in the well by a witch’s curse.
This theme of human beings magically transformed into frogs is not unique to this story, or to German folklore. Consider the following climactic reveal from “The Betrothal Gifts: The Story of Kublik and the Frog,” included in Parker Fillmore’s 1919 anthology Czechoslovak Fairy Tales.
“You don’t know us, do you, Kubik?” the older lady said. “I was that old frog who coaxed you to the cliff and this, my beautiful daughter, was the other little frog, the very ugly one, that you feared you would have to take home to your father’s house as your bride. You see, Kubik, we were all under an evil enchantment…
This submotif of humans cursed to become frogs dates back to the ancient world. In book six of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the goddess Latona (the mother of Apollo and Diana, better known by her Greek name Leto) flees the wrath of her lover Jupiter’s jealous wife Juno. Arriving in Lycia in modern-day Turkey, Latona tries to drink from a lake but is denied by the locals, who stir up the lake bottom to make the water muddy. “Anger forgot thirst,” in the words of Anthony Kline’s translation. Commanding the Lycians to “Live in that swamp forever!” she transforms them into frogs.
These tales of transformation also extend beyond the western world. In the folklore of the ǀXam people of South Africa, for instance, girls can be transformed into frogs as a punishment for disobeying their parents or violating ritual purity taboos.
The pioneering Japanese folklorist Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962) recorded several local tales of frogs transforming into humans, or vice versa. In “The Frog Wife,” a tale known in several different versions, a candle seller watches his wife jump into a pond and transform into a frog. “The Snake Son-in-Law” begins with the following startling and somewhat alarming sentence: “A certain farmer tried to save a frog from a snake that was trying to swallow it by promising one of his daughters to the snake.”
The daughter in question manages to outwit and escape from the snake — thus avoiding an almost certainly dysfunctional marriage — and takes refuge at the home of a kind old woman. This woman takes the former snake-fiancée to the local castle town, where she wins the heart of and marries the local feudal lord. “That kind old woman,” the tale concludes, “was really the frog that the farmer had saved.”
I will conclude this section with “The Frog Princess,” an archetypal tale, probably of eastern European origin, with similarities to both Cinderella and Cupid and Psyche. According to Italo Calvino, there are at least 300 versions of this story from throughout Europe. (And, as we will see shortly, Asian versions as well.) Calvino himself retells one version of this story in his anthology of Italian folktales and it is there that I will begin.
“There was once a king,” Calvino begins his tale,
who had three sons of marriageable age. In order to avoid any dispute over their choice of three brides, he said, "Aim as far as you can with the sling. There where the stone falls you will get your wife."
The three sons picked up their slings and shot. The oldest boy sent his stone flying all the way to the roof of a bakery, so he got the baker girl. The second boy released his stone, which came down on the house of a weaver. The youngest son's stone landed in a ditch.
The amphibious fiancée must outcompete her future sisters-in-law at two tasks: spinning hemp into cloth and raising a puppy into a dog. She succeeds and is betrothed to the young crown prince. On their wedding day, he falls asleep and wakes up to see her transformed into “a maiden as dazzling as the sun and dressed in an emerald-green gown.”
Variations of this story appear in many different European languages. In the Brothers Grimm tale “The Three Feathers,” for instance, a king sends his three sons out into the world to bring him back the world’s most beautiful carpet; the prince who does so will become his heir. The youngest prince encounters a frog (a toad in some versions) who gives him the world’s most beautiful carpet. The incredulous king asks for the world’s most beautiful ring, which the frog again provides. He then asks to be brough the world’s most beautiful woman, which triggers the frog’s transformation into her true form.
This story, or variations on it, have traveled far beyond Europe. Maung Htin Aung’s 1948 anthology of Burmese Folk-Tales, for instance, includes a strikingly similar tale called “The Frog Maiden,” which begins with a human mother giving birth to a frog. Despite her species, the titular frog maiden is raised as a human being and marries a human prince. Like Psyche, she must perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks, in this case to win the king’s approval.
The final task is to bring the king “the most beautiful woman on this earth.” The prince takes her to the king, who asks “where is your beautiful maiden?”
‘I will answer for the prince, my king’, said the Frog Princess. ‘I am his beautiful maiden.’ She then took off her frog skin and stood a beautiful maiden dressed in silk and satin. The king declared her to be the most beautiful maiden in the world, and selected the Prince as his successor on the throne. The Prince asked his Princess never to put on the ugly frog skin again, and the Frog Princess, to accede to his request, threw the skin into the fire.
IV.
A full discussion of what these frog transformation stories — and their obvious cross-cultural resonances — might mean would take up the rest of this post and would take us far away from Pokémon.
One meaning is clear. Frogs’ dramatic transformations over their life cycle have catalyzed the imagination in many different times and places, inspiring stories about other kinds of transformations. Pokémon itself seems to be a work in this tradition.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Pokémon evolution bears almost no resemblance to actual biological evolution. It is also significantly different than real-world animals’ gradual growth from infancy to maturity. Pokémon instantly, dramatically transform from one form into another, sometimes immediately gaining new abilities.
I began this post with an excerpt from a 1999 TIME Magazine interview with Pokémon cocreator Satoshi Tajiri: a series of questions and answers about Tajiri’s childhood collection of frogs and insects. This youthful fascination, as discussed elsewhere, inspired both Pokémon in general and specific features of specific Pokémon, such as the spiral bellies of Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath. I propose a connection between Pokémon evolution, which would be much more accurately described as transformation or metamorphosis, and the transformations undergone by these animals as they grow.
The life cycles of frogs and of insects such as butterflies involve more dramatic changes than those of any other animal; they are true metamorphoses. I have to think that, when the adult Satoshi Tajiri began work on a game inspired by these youthful experiences, memories of these metamorphoses must have played a role in that game’s world being one where creatures transform into new forms.
He would, as we’ve seen, be following in a long line of storytellers who have found inspiration in the tadpole’s transformation into a frog.
V.
“The place where I grew up,” Satoshi Tajiri told TIME in the aforementioned interview, “was still rural back then. There were rice paddies, rivers, forests. It was full of nature.” Tajiri goes on to mention fishing ponds, overturning stones to find beetles, catching crayfish in rivers and, as previously quoted, catching frogs and watching them grow.
These formative experiences, as previously mentioned, shape both specific aspects of Pokémon and, I would argue, Pokémon as a whole, giving it a different flavor than many other fantasy or mythopoeic works.
In both mythology and fantasy, mythical creatures tend to live in remote areas, in underworlds, in places far removed from the everyday world of the village or the town. The medieval bestiaries, for instance, placed dragons in India and Ethiopia, lands that were distant to the point of being semi-mythical for their western European audiences. The monsters of Tolkien’s Middle Earth live far away from the Shire: Gollum on an island in an underground lake far below the Misty Mountains; the dragon Smaug guards his treasure hoard within the Lonely Mountain; Shelob lives at Cirith Ungol in the mountains of Mordor above the dead city of Minas Morgul.
This motif of course also appears in Pokémon. The legendary bird Articuno, for instance, can only be found at the end of a labyrinth of waterlogged caverns underneath the Seafoam Islands. But Articuno is legendary in contrast to dozens and dozens of more quotidian Pokémon who can be found not at the end of a long dungeon but by visiting the nearest field, forest or river. And one of the unique appeals of Pokémon has to be this emphasis on Pokémon themselves as part of an ecosystem, as creatures waiting to be discovered just around the corner.
All versions of the Pokédex abound with descriptions of Pokémon as both mythical creatures with strange powers and as animals living in specific habitats. Weedle are “often found in forests, eating leaves;” Pidgey are “a common sight in forests and woods;” Pikachu “lives in forests away from people;” Sandshrew live in burrows “deep underground in arid locations far from water;” Ekans “wraps its long body around tree branches to rest;” Zubat “forms colonies in perpetually dark places;” Venonat “lives in the shadows of tall trees where it eats insects;” Meowth “wanders the streets on a nightly basis to look for dropped loose change;” Golduck “is often seen swimming elegantly by lake shores;” Seaking “travel up rivers to spawn.”
(Reoccurring words like “forest,” “tree” and “river” evoke the landscape of Tajiri’s childhood in then-rural Machida City.)
Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, the Game Boy Advance remakes of the original Pokémon games, categorize Pokémon by habitat as well as species and type; these habits include grassland, forest, water’s edge (including Poliwag and its evolutions), sea, cave, mountain, rough terrain and urban. In all versions of the game, of course, Pokémon only appear in their natural habitat, such as Zubat in caves or Poliwag in lakes and rivers.
In their technologically limited way, the original games ludify this concept by making the game’s terrain not just a space to traverse but also a stage for potential encounters with Pokémon. Once the player character acquires a fishing rod, for example, the player can fish in any accessible body of water, from the smallest pond to the ocean. Similarly, the grassy areas outside every city and town are the homes of various avian, mammalian and reptilian Pokémon. More recent Pokémon games have added new ways to interact with the environment and discover Pokémon in quotidian places. Rock Smash, for instance, can reveal Pokémon hidden underneath rocks, while Dive allows players to encounter Pokémon on the ocean floor.
I could not have been the only child of the 1990s whose family road trips — or even visits to the local park — were enlivened by daydreamy speculation about which Pokémon could inhabit that particular forest or lake or beach or hillside. The Pokémon world seems designed to spark this kind of imaginative activity. It is not an alien planet, or a surreal alternative world. It is a world recognizably like our own, Japan minus suburbanization and real animals2 but plus Pokémon, a place a child’s imagination can easily combine with his or her immediate surroundings.
Reading fairy tales, C.S. Lewis once wrote, gives our real world “a new dimension of depth;” a tale of an enchanted forest “makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
This is of course the primary appeal of Pokémon Go: the virtual appearance of Pokémon in one’s own neighborhood. As in the Game Boy games, the Pokémon Go player discovers new Pokémon in new areas, types of Pokémon that would live in that place. Water Pokémon, for instance, naturally appear on or near bodies of water, while Grass Pokémon appear near parks and gardens and Ghost Pokémon only come out at night.
Both Pokémon Go and the traditional Pokémon games present a fantastical embellishment of something very real. Even in our artificial, technologically transformed world, we are never very far from ecosystems, from animal habitats: the neighborhood park, the hiking trail or nature preserve, even the miniature world of the highway median. Outside of the most developed urban areas, these worlds are as discoverable as they were for young Satoshi Tajiri. Metamorphosis happens in your local forest and frog pond.
Bibliography:
Aung, Htin Maung. Burmese Folk-Tales. Oxford University Press, 1948.
Calvino, Italo. Italian Folktales Selected and Retold by Italo Calvino. Translated by Geroge Martin. Pantheon, 1980.
Chua-Eoan, Howard, and Tim Larimer. "Beware of the Pokemania." Time, November 22, 1999.
Fillmore, Parker. Czechoslovak Folk Tales. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1919.
Kunio, Yanagita. The Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale. Translated and Edited by Fanny Hagin Mayer. Indiana University Press, 1986.
Larimer, Tim and Takashi Yokota. "The Ultimate Game Freak." Time, Nov. 22, 1999.
Lewis, Clive Staples. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. HarperOne, 2017.
Lin, Jingyi & Hongsuwan, Pathom. “Symbolic Meanings of Frogs and Toads in The Myths and Rituals in the Greater Mekong Subregion.” International Journal of Religion. 5. 20-30. (2024).
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Thorp, C. (2015). Rain's things and girls' rain: Marriage, potency and frog symbolism in /Xam and ju/'hoan ethnography. Southern African Humanities, 27, 165-90.
Werness, Hope B. Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in World Art. A&C Black, 2006.
Zipes, Jack. "What Makes a Repulsive Frog so Appealing: Memetics and Fairy Tales." Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 109-143.
Second generation Pokémon games added an alternate final form, the pure Water-type Politoed.
Real-life animals have made rare appearances in Pokémon media, as discussed in this Bulbapedia article.
This was fantastic!!!!! I love frogs so much…. I used to love listening to them singing at night from my apartment in Tokyo! Kind of like fire flies. I think they’re especially sensitive to their environment… And so they’re almost like a barometer of healthy ecosystem. When I was a child, once in a while, you could hear a toad in the summer out my window in Los Angeles but those days are very long gone! This is my favorite of your posts so far!
When I was a kid, I found a frog on the first day of school and I took that to mean I was going to have a really great school year. I don't remember if I actually did, but I still remember that moment clearly. Thank you for the thoughtful post! New appreciation for Poliwag!