This year’s winning entry was by Terin Jackson, an American living in Kyoto who writes a blog for his private tour company. The competition took him out of his comfort zone, forcing him to cut down on his natural verbosity in order to keep within the word limit. ‘The process of whittling it all down from 500 words to 300 was both heartbreaking and enlightening,’ he writes.

For their part the judges felt the piece tackled a part of Kyoto culture that is at once deeply rooted in the history of the city yet is little-known by the average visitor despite its ‘exoticism’. Few will have even heard of the temple festival it describes, yet the maintenance of tradition in this way is a vital way in which the differing communities within Kyoto maintain their distinctiveness. The use of the masks to transform identities, and the reference to the tengu language as a ‘a baffling babble evocative of breaking branches, windswept bark, and wet leaves’ was felt to be particularly effective.

[Tengu are mysterious creatures which inhabit the woods. There are two types: one is long nosed and red-faced, the other bird-like with beak and feathers.]

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Photos by Terin Jackson

Tengu: A Firsthand Account

Timidly, five tengu emerge from the forest surrounding a remote hillside temple in Arashiyama. Matted eyebrows, wild moustaches, grotesque noses. Skin tones of red, turquoise, and gold. Clinking trinkets dangling from their soiled yamabushi priest robes. They walk on crooked legs, uneasy on the rocky ground. Rarely do these creatures leave the safety of the treetops. Their nervous eyes scan the crowd of villagers gathered to welcome these strange annual visitors to the autumn festival.

The tengu scamper into the temple. The local priest greets them and begins his chanting. The raspy voices of the tengu soon join in and fill the cold hall with a rough music so rarely heard by human ears. The sacred connection has been renewed, man and monster in perfect accord for a single day of the year.

Wilderness and village agreeing to live in harmony for another cycle of seasons.

Uneasy silence. Breaths held. The creatures slowly rise. A blessing in the tengu language croaks out from five beaked mouths, a baffling babble evocative of creaking branches, windswept bark, and wet leaves.

“Namu-shen-kwa, namu-shen-kwa, namu-shen-kwa.”

The ritual is complete. With a nod to the priest, the tengu slip back into the woods.

Several minutes pass. Five old men appear, wearing yamabushi robes and rubbing their faces. They greet their fellow villagers. The villagers respond in kind. Knowing smiles and looks of satisfaction all around.

A skeptic would say that this was simply five old guys dressed up in silly costumes, doing their best to keep the ancient traditions of their shrinking community alive. However, unless you can catch a tengu and ask him, there’s honestly no way to know for sure.