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)
I.
Your local sushi restaurant likely has an item called a kappamaki or kappa roll on the menu: a simple cucumber and rice roll, wrapped in seaweed. The name comes from perhaps the quintessential Japanese mythical creature or yokai, the water-dwelling kappa, which is said to have a taste for cucumbers.
This sushi roll is only one example of the extent to which the kappa has escaped the confines of folklore studies to become a consistent presence in Japanese (and now international) pop culture. As Michael Dylan Foster writes in a 1998 Asian Folklore Studies article, “the kappa has become primarily a commercial icon,” one that he compares to Hello Kitty in terms of sheer ubiquity. A visitor to Japan, for example, can eat at Kappa Sushi (the country’s fourth largest sushi restaurant chain), drink Kappa extra-dry sake, eat Kappa Ebisen shrimp snacks, and buy Kappa Kappa pencil cases.
In his article, Foster describes the kappa’s success as the mascot of Imagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture, which has renamed both its train station and its post office after the creature; a kappa statue at the station greets visitors to the town. Imagawa is not the only Japanese town to use a kappa mascot. Kappa Kotarou is the mascot of Tokyo’s Sumida Ward, Kappa Green represents Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, and Kapal, the mascot of Shiki, Saitama Prefecture, took first place in the Yuru-Chara Grand Prix 2018 as Japan’s top character mascot.
The kappa has also become an environmental symbol; as Foster writes in The Book of Yokai,
This slimy creature that once terrorized people and animals venturing near the water has now become a symbol of unspoiled nature. You can find cutesified kappa images posted near rivers, imploring people not to litter or spoil the environment.
Foster argues that the modern kappa has transcended its origin in local legend to become a symbol, first of rural Japan and then, to a great extent, of Japan itself. It has held something of this national status for about a century, if not longer; when Ryūnosuke Akutagawa wrote a scathing satire of Taishō-era Japan, he set it in a Swiftian land of talking kappas and called it simply Kappa (1927). (In the words of Borges, Akutagawa’s writing involved “the psychological reinterpretation of the traditions and legends of his country.”)
Kappa is only the first of many 20th and 21st century reinterpretations of the kappa in pop culture. From the sixties manga Sanpei the Kappa to the manga and anime InuYasha to the cheesy giant monster movie Death Kappa (2010), the creature has refused to exit the spotlight. (Like the mandrake, the subject of the previous post in this series, it has also appeared in Harry Potter.)
Several video game characters bear a family resemblance to these modern, kawaii kappas, including the koopa troopas so frequently victimized by the Mario brothers, the Zoras in The Legend of Zelda (especially in the earlier games), the ferryman Kapp’n in Animal Crossing and of course, Pokémon like Squirtle, Psyduck and Golduck.
Unlike, say, Charizard or Ninetales, which represent direct translations of mythical creatures into Pokémon, both the Squirtle and Psyduck families incorporate aspects of the kappa alongside those of other creatures, including real-world animals in both cases and the aforementioned Koopas in the former case. Squirtle’s ultimate evolution Blastoise takes obvious influence from the giant monster Gamera, the star of twelve films at the time of writing, and also seems to be something of a cross between a turtle and a tank. The intermediate stage Wartortle takes after the legendarily long-lived turtle minogame, who you might know from the tale of the fisherman Urashima Tarō, a Japanese analogue of Rip Van Winkle.
Therefore, this post will focus on their specifically kappa-esque aspects, which includes the most obvious fact about them, their water type. While most first-generation water Pokémon seem to get their elemental abilities to control water by the virtue of being based on real aquatic animals, these three creatures come by it a different way. As descendants — albeit distant — of the kappa, these creatures inherit ancient, archetypal watery powers, powers that originated in a respect for and fear of the natural world.
II.
Squirtle is of course one of the most famous Pokémon, with appearances in Super Smash Bros., Pokémon Detective Pikachu and dozens and dozens of anime episodes, as well as on no fewer than 26 Pokémon cards, t-shirts, and as a little terrapin menagerie of plush and plastic toys. It is one of three potential starting Pokémon, alongside Bulbasaur and Charmander, in Red and Blue and a member of anime protagonist Ash’s party for multiple seasons.
It also bears quite a likeness to the kappa of marketing. In The Book of Yokai, Foster mentions a study by Japanese folklorist Ito Ryohei, who once asked his students to draw three yokai. They all drew the kappa the same way: “a small cute creature, a head with hair surrounding a saucer, a beak and webbed hands and feet, and a shell on its back.” With the exception of the hair surrounding a saucer, which I will discuss later, this description of the pop culture kappa also perfectly describes Squirtle down to the shell on its back. Professor Ito’s classroom exercise, intended to demonstrate the ubiquity of the commercialized kappa, also demonstrates this creature’s influence on Pokémon.
In addition to this visual resemblance, Squirtle has three main things in common with the kappa.
Its first kappa element is obvious: its connection to water, which is both its habitat and its pseudo-magical power. Whether swimming, as in the Team Rocket set card above, or standing by a lake, as in the Base Set card, or relaxing by the riverside, as in the Japanese vending machine card, this is a creature of the water or, more specifically, of where land and freshwater meet. (It is also, importantly, a creature of rural Japan, with no buildings or other signs of human development visible in any of the card illustrations; Foster, as I previously mentioned, emphasizes the kappa as first an imaginary inhabitant and then a symbol of rural Japan.)
Squirtle “powerfully sprays foam from its mouth,” according to the Red and Blue Pokédex; in the anime, Ash’s Pokédex describes “amazing range and accuracy” of Squirtle’s water blasts. In the games, it learns two powerful water-type attacks with self-explanatory names, Water Gun and Hydro Pump. Pokédex entries on Squirtle’s ultimate evolution Blastoise focus on the power of these attacks. “Attacks from the hydro cannons on its back are virtually unstoppable,” in the words of Ash’s Pokédex.
Per various Pokédexes, Squirtle and its family use their water blasts in the wild as well as in matches. Squirtle, the Pokémon Yellow Pokédex informs us, “shoots water at prey while in the water.” According to the Red and Blue Pokédex, its evolution Wartortle “often hides in water to stalk unwary prey.” Despite the Charmander family’s clear influences from both carnivorous dinosaurs and dragons, Squirtle’s is the only starter family specifically described as predatory; this hunting behavior is the second key commonality between Squirtle and the kappa.
While the Pokémon anime, with a handful of exceptions, shies away from showing or even mentioning Pokémon hunting and eating other Pokémon, it does show a lighter, friendlier version of Squirtle-as-predator by making the creature a mischievous troublemaker, which is the third main point of similarity with the kappa.
Ash captures his Squirtle in the anime’s twelfth episode, “Here Comes the Squirtle Squad,” an episode that begins with the formulaic opening of many anime episodes: Ash, Pikachu, Misty and Brock arrive at a new town and meet the locals, who face a Pokémon-related problem. In this case, it is the titular Squirtle Squad, a group of five delinquent Squirtle who terrorize the town with their pranks. After trapping Ash and company in a pitfall and stealing Jesse and James’ food, they are convinced by Meowth to work for Team Rocket; after a show of heroism by Ash, they decide to abandon their criminal ways, with their leader joining Ash’s party and the rest remaining in town to serve as its firefighters.
Squirtle quickly becomes one of Ash’s key Pokémon. One of its most dramatic appearances comes in the anime’s 16 episode, “Pokémon Shipwreck,” an homage to The Poseidon Adventure (1972) that finds the protagonists (and Team Rocket) trapped on the sunken S.S. Anne. After Ash’s Charmander burns through the ship’s hull, Ash and Pikachu tie themselves to Squirtle, a strong swimmer who carries them up to the ocean’s surface. (Misty, a water-type specialist, uses two of her own Pokémon to save herself and Brock.)
This scene reflects Pokémon gameplay (Squirtle, like all water-type Pokémon, can learn Surf, which gives it the ability to transport the player character across the water) but also represents an inversion of the old kappa, which generally dragged people down to a watery grave rather than saving them from it.
III.
Golduck’s Red and Blue Pokédex entry is the only first generation Pokédex entry to mention a specific yokai by name: “Often seen swimming elegantly by lake shores. It is often mistaken for the Japanese monster, Kappa.”
Why would one mistake a Golduck for a kappa? (I’ll gloss over the suggestion that actual kappa — and not just Pokémon inspired by them — exist in the Pokémon world.) First, they have a broadly similar appearance. Both are somewhat reptilian- or amphibian-looking bipeds, of about human height, with webbed hands and feet. They both live in lakes and are both powerful swimmers. (According to the anime Pokédex, “Golduck is very adept at using its webbed hands and feet, making it the fastest swimming Pokémon of all.”) Finally, as mentioned in the Pokémon Stadium Pokédex (and in multiple later Pokédex entries), Golduck generally appears at dusk, a time of reduced visibility.
Strangely, Golduck never appeared in the original series of the Pokémon anime and made its animated debut in the first Pokémon movie. In manga, appears in neither The Electric Tale of Pikachu nor Magical Pokémon Journey and plays a very minor role in Pokémon Adventures. It can be caught in only one location in Red and Blue (the Seafoam Islands) and in Yellow (a pond or small lake on Route 6 between Vermilion City and Saffron City).
Like Squirtle, Golduck’s initial form Psyduck resembles some of the cutesy kappa mascots, especially those that take after ducks, like Kappa Kotarou. And, like Squirtle, its large head and generally babylike proportions reflect one particularly morbid explanation for the kappa’s origins. According to a few sources, the kappa may have originated as a folk memory of an ancient practice of floating the bodies of stillborn babies downriver; this explains the name ‘river child’ and later stories about grotesque half-human, half-kappa babies, which I will discuss in the next section.
IV.
If Squirtle, Psyduck, Golduck and all of the various kawaii mascots we’ve looked at take after the same mythical creature, what do they tell us about that original?
It obviously inhabits lakes and rivers, as we know from both the Pokémon and the aforementioned Japanese anti-littering campaign. It is a strong swimmer with webbed hands and feet but can also walk on land, like the Golduck that it can apparently be mistaken for. Water is not just its habitat; it is a water elemental, able to, in some way, use the water’s power. It likely has a beak, like duck- and turtle-inspired Pokémon, and possibly a large head, like Squirtle and Psyduck, and/or a shell, like Squirtle.
It is, at largest, about the size of a human, not a giant monster. It is powerful, both in terms of physical strength and, perhaps possesses some supernatural powers like the psychically gifted Psyduck and Golduck. And, like Squirtle and Wartortle, it is likely a predator.
Foster gives this description of the kappa in The Book of Yokai:
generally speaking, the kappa is thought of as scaly or slimy, greenish in color, with webbed feet and hands, and 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. A concave indentation or saucer on top of the kappa’s head contains water; if this water is spilled, the creature loses its super strength.
(If a memory of stillborn children is part of the kappa’s DNA, could the water on its head be a mythologization of congenital disorders like hydrocephalus or hydranencephaly?)
The word itself comes from a combination of the words kawa (“river”) and warabe (“child”) and the kappa’s current pop culture image is an amalgamation of two older regional creatures, the slimy, turtle-shelled kappa of eastern Japanese folklore and the monkeylike kawataro of western Japan; the yokai artist and bestiarist Toriyama Sekien, whose work I mentioned in the introduction to this series, seems to have conflated the two creatures in one of his 18th century yokai bestiaries, influencing later depictions.
As Foster emphasizes in both his scholarly article and full-length book, ‘kappa’ was in some sense an umbrella term or family name for a group of related creatures, each of which was said to inhabit a particular local lake or river; there are more than eighty local kappa legends, from all regions of Japan, and at least a dozen regional names for the creature.
As seen in the following illustration, from about 1850, regional versions of the kappa still had a tremendous variety seventy-five years after Sekien published his first bestiary. Some of the creatures have turtle-like shells on their backs, but some do not. Most are green with slimy or scaly skin, but three are hairy and clay-colored, with some displaying both slimy green skin and body hair. While the majority are bipedal, two walk or crawl on all fours. The one at center right has a large, duck-billed head that somewhat resembles Psyduck’s (and, presumably, those of the stillborn infants that may have inspired the kappa.)
One feature common to all of them is the bowl-like indentation on top of their heads, which holds the water which is their life-force, the source of their power.
Key aspects of kappa behavior:
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, kappa are famously fond of cucumbers. Foster mentions “a tradition of leaving cucumbers at shrines or in the water as offerings to appease the resident kappa.”
These offerings reflect the kappa’s possible origin as a suijin or Shinto water god associated with agricultural and human fertility.
Depending on the legend, the kappa’s diet can also include melons, eggplant, soba noodles, natto (fermented soybeans) and, at times, the flesh of children.
Kappa also have a taste for human livers and will pull both adults and children into the water and drown them in order to obtain this delicacy.
One of the kappa’s local names is komahiki (“horse puller”), which reflects its frequent attempts to pulls horses (and sometimes cattle) down to a watery death.
Kappa have a love of sumo wrestling and can be defeated by a human challenger who bows to them; the kappa bows back, causing the water to spill out of its head-indentation and thus drain it of its strength.
Kappa will leave their watery homes to sexually assault and impregnate human women, who eventually give birth to grotesque hybrid offspring that are ritually dismembered by victims’ families.
On a similar note, voyeuristic kappa sometimes hide in women’s toilets.
If a human can yank off a kappa’s arm, the kappa in question will offer a number of gifts in exchange for the arm’s return, including assistance in farmwork, a promise to leave the local community alone, or, Foster’s words, knowledge of “its secret bone setting techniques and formulas for making medicines and salves.”
The rare human being who gains a kappa’s loyalty can expect regular offerings of fresh fish.
Kappa are repelled by iron and hollow gourds.
Despite the kappa’s capacity for violence, they are often thought of with some affection, as sometimes foolish tricksters as well as water demons. As Barbra Terri Okada writes in a Met exhibition catalogue, “its face is usually that of a pouting child rather than terrifying monster.”
As perhaps the most well-known of yokai, the kappa was widely depicted in Japanese culture centuries before its revival as a modern advertising mascot. They appear in Toriyama Sekien’s previously mentioned yokai bestiaries, as netsuke, as statues, in collections of folk tales, on decorated fans, in woodblock prints (some too risqué to include here) and on painted handscrolls.
Finally, it must be mentioned that, in rural Japan, belief in the kappa lasted into the twentieth century. “In my own fieldwork,” Foster writes in The Book of Yokai,
I interviewed a number of older residents of the small community of Teuchi in Kagoshima Prefecture. They told me how, as children, they were warned about a terrifying water creature called a gamashiro. When I asked them to describe it, one of them told me that it was “just like a kappa.”
V.
If you read last year’s post on Clefairy and Clefable’s mythic roots, some aspects of the kappa might seem familiar. The kappa is a humanoid creature, often imagined as diminutive, associated with specific local natural features like lakes and rivers. Mischievous and with something approaching human intelligence, it makes excursions from its world into our own, sometimes to steal food or animals, sometimes to mate with human beings.
It is fiercely protective of its own territory; intruders are often never seen or heard from again. On the rare occasion that a human being can gain its trust, he or she can gain its secret knowledge. Finally, it has a strong dislike of iron.
The kappa, in other words, bears a certain resemblance to the ‘little people’ of European folklore such as fairies, elves and trolls and to their classical ancestors the nymphs, naiads and dryads. (Lafcadio Hearn, writing for a 19th century western audience unfamiliar with the creature, describes the kappa as a water imp or water goblin.) Like them, the kappa has enjoyed a commercially successful second life as a cute, child-friendly creature completely lacking its former menace.
The nymphs and naiads likely originated as nature gods and goddesses who devolved into local guardian spirits after they stopped being actively worshipped; Foster writes that “the kappa seems to be derived from a suijin (water deity) and is intimately associated with fertility and the harvest.” In both cases, as I’ve previously noted of the nymphs and fairies, the creatures’ mischievous natures and sheer unpredictability might reflect something of the vicissitudes of nature as experienced by a small, technologically primitive community.
(This entire series takes its name from a Borges quote about how the dragon’s universality reflects its imaginative necessity; is there a mischievous little person-shaped hole as well as a dragon-shaped hole in the human imagination? One can find examples from across the world, not just western Europe and Japan, such as the alux of Mayan mythology, the chaneke of Aztec mythology, the Nirumbee/Awwakkulé of Crow Nation mythology, the Menehune of Native Hawaiian mythology, the Nittaewo of Sri Lankan urban legend and the Yumboes of Senegalese mythology. But this digression is a topic for another post.)
VI.
As Joseph Campbell argues, one of a monster’s major imaginative functions is to mark the divide between the familiar, local environment and the mysterious, threatening world beyond it. Foster makes the same point in The Book of Yokai, describing yokai as “creatures of the borderlands,” inhabiting the wild spaces between villages, appearing at twilight, and guarding bridges, tunnels and crossroads. (The kappa’s distant descendant Golduck, as we’ve already seen, is generally seen at dusk.)
In the case of the kappa, it clearly serves as a guardian of the land-water boundary, as a potentially dangerous presence lurking literally beneath the surface. As Foster and other writers note, generations of Japanese parents warned their children not to go swimming in the local river lest the kappa would notice them and pull them under. A monster’s muscular arms pulling you under the surface — the kappa is a vivid, perfect mythicization of the very real dangers of drowning, one that would stick in a child’s imagination.
In Pokémon’s gamified way, the Squirtle and Psyduck families do inherit this embodiment of water’s power. They can use the element in both destructive — attacks like Hydro Pump — and constructive — transporting their trainers across rivers and oceans — ways, navigating through seas, rivers and lakes like the water elementals they are.
VII.
While Michael Dylan Foster’s two books on yokai have been essential resources for this series since its inception, I read his earlier scholarly article on kappa specifically for this post. The last two paragraphs resonated with me, almost striking me with déjà vu, because of how close they are to what I’ve written — 25 or so years later — about myth in the modern world.
A story I’ve told in many (perhaps most) of these posts is that of diminution, of a once awe-inspiring mythical creature losing its menace and its aura in the modern world and thus becoming a child-friendly imaginary pet. Charizard lacks the Satanic overtones of the medieval dragon; Clefairy and Clefable lack the old fairie folk’s ability to inspire fear; Vulpix and Ninetales are not the seductresses that the kitsune could be.
In the same way, Foster describes the modern, commercial kappa as “pacified” and “harmless,” writing that
the kappa of the late twentieth century has been captured and tamed; the wildness and dangers of nature have been exorcised and it has become a cute, docile pet more acceptable in an urbanized industrial society.
(Pokémon itself, of course, is literally about the capturing and taming of mythological creatures.) But Foster does not see this transformation as entirely negative. Mythical creatures, as he notes of the kappa, have “never been static” and have been constantly reinvented by the human imagination. Had the kappa not been appropriated by pop culture, he writes, “it most likely would have died — or survived only as a museum relic in collections of folklore.”
Consider the creatures of the medieval European bestiary, for instance. Side by side with real animals and the still-familiar dragon and phoenix and unicorn we find a zoo’s worth of now forgotten creatures: the amphisbaena, the jaculus, the bonnacon, the cerastes, the ichneumon. The survivors have survived, in large part, because fantasy novelists, children’s book illustrators, RPG designers, animators and others have breathed new life into them and expose them to new generations.
And, to return again to the raison d'être of this whole series, these creatures (even Pokémon) can retain something of their ancestors’ power, enough of a resemblance to at least keep those ancient bloodlines alive.
Cute little Squirtle, like the cartoon kappa on the bag of shrimp-flavored snacks, is the tip of an iceberg that descends into the murky depths of myth and ritual.
Bibliography:
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Penguin, 2000.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Foster, Michael Dylan. “The Metamorphosis of the Kappa: Transformation of Folklore to Folklorism in Japan.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57., no.1 (1998).
—. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai. University of California Press, 2009.
—. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015.
Hearn, Lafcadio. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Volume II). Houghton Mifflin, 1894.
—. Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Anthology of His Writings on the Country and Its People. Edited by Donald Richie. Tuttle, 2007.
Lewis, Clive Staples. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. HarperOne, 2017.
Marczewski, Edward. “Kappa Sushi in Japan a Delicious Restaurant Option.” Stars and Stripes Pacific, 23 September 2021.
Motoko, Rich, and Hikari Hida. “Putting a Face on What Spooks You.” New York Times, 17 April 2023.
Okada, Barbra Teri. Netsuke Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Abrams, 1982.
Smith, Colin. “Lucky Gods and Playful Spirits.” Kansai Time Out, August 2003.
Yoshimura, Ayako. “To Believe and Not to Believe: A Native Ethnography of Kanashibari in Japan.” Journal of American Folklore, vol.128, no.508 (Spring 2015).
Author’s Note: Thanks to fellow Substacker for encouraging me to write a post on Squirtle and thus complete this series’ analysis of the three original starting Pokémon. Next up in this series, which is now returning to Pokédex number order, will be posts on the Growlithe and Poliwag families.
I’m also in the middle of a short story, which I now I realize I have to rewrite if it’s going to work. Sometimes, you have to get things wrong at first in order to get them right in the end.
What an absolute treat! And an absolute embarrassment I had never seen any resemblance in Squirtle to a kappa..
OK, so here's something I never figured out about Pokémon and the kappa. Later installments of the series introduce a character named Lotad, who is absolutely unambiguously based on the kappa in a way e.g. Psy-DUCK isn't, and in particular goes all in on the head-bowl. He's all head-bowl - and a very cute one.
But then his mature form, Ludicolo, is... I don't know how to describe him other than as a Chiquita Banana fever dream of Latin American exotica - a poncho-clad pineapple with the face of Jose Carioca. I've never understood the progression there - is there a deeper mythical meaning to that?