Yamajijii
Yamajijii is a type of yōkai that takes on the appearance of an old man with one eye and one leg. It has a height of about 90–120 centimeters with gray hair growing all over its body. It has teeth that could easily crush the bones of wild boar or a monkey, and hunters would tame this yamajijii with bait and use it to drive away wolves.
↻ synthesized from 2 sources
When
- First attested
- 1500 CE
- Attested period
- 1500 – 2020
- Historical notes
- Documented in the Early Modern Tosa Yōkai Documentation (近世土佐妖怪資料, Kinsei Tosa Yōkai Shiryou).
Relationships
Sources
Source passages
“At the end of the year, a yamajijii appeared wanting mochi, so it was given a lot of it. The next year also had a great harvest and even more mochi was given to the yamajijii. In the end, as a result of this repeating many times, the yamajijii became able to eat three to (about 54.5 liters) of mochi and Nakao, who feared for his family finances, gave him burned stones which he presented as mochi”
#8801 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001
“the yamauba is accompanied by a yamajijii (mountain old man) and a yamawaro (mountain child), and here the yamauba would be called a yamahaha (山母; mountain mother) and the yamajijii a yamachichi (山父; mountain father)”
#8819 · extracted by anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5