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Paper short abstract

This paper examines an obscure tradition that Bakumatsu activist Sakamoto Ryōma, when a young man, challenged and unmasked a fraud pretending to be a tengu.

Paper long abstract

The Bakumatsu activist Sakamoto Ryōma (1836–67) is one of Japan’s most popular and iconic heroes, and the 1883 narrative Kanketsu Senri no Koma is often credited as the first in a genre of Ryōmaden or somewhat larger-than-life stories of his adventures. It features an episode in which a young Ryōma travels to a nearby town and exposes a charlatan who was pretending to be a tengu in order to defraud superstitious villagers. There is little evidence that anything of the kind actually happened, and perhaps because the anecdote was judged to be of trifling importance, it was left out of subsequent Ryōma narratives such as Shiba Ryōtarō’s blockbuster 1960s serialized novel Ryōma ga yuku—until in the 1980s, it was powerfully re-imagined in the manga O~i! Ryōma authored by Takeda Testuya and illustrated by Koyama Yū. In their version, the “tengu” becomes a shipwrecked American sailor whom Ryōma rescues and befriends, and who returns years later to take him on a seabound adventure to Shanghai. This paper explores the layers of fact and fiction, of de-mystification and re-mystification surrounding this intriguing story; the ambivalent nature of the tengu and its relationship to folk heroes; and the stubborn presence of the folkloric even in the annals of a supposed exemplar of modernity.