Toriyama Sekien's bestiaries are full of monsters with a job — something they steal, someone they frighten, a rule for surviving them. Then, in his 1779 volume Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (今昔画図続百鬼), he drew a robed, monk-like figure set into a mountain crag. His short caption says it lives deep in the mountains of Hitachi province. It shows itself only when the weather is fine. That is hiyoribō (日和坊), and its entire nature is contained in that one habit.
What does it look like?
Sekien's print is quiet and plain. The figure is an old, bald, monk-like man in a loose robe. The "bō" (坊) in its name is the same syllable used for a monk or a temple boy. He has a lined, calm face. He stands in a hollow of rock on a mountainside, with pines and drifting cloud below. He has no shrine, staff, or companion. There is nothing to fight and nothing to steal; the whole picture is a mountain, some cloud, and someone who happens to be standing there.
A creature that only exists in good weather
The one fact every source agrees on is the core of it: hiyoribō comes out when the sky is clear. When it rains, it has no form at all. It does not curse travelers, spoil crops, or drag anyone into a river. It simply cannot be seen except under the one condition it needs.
This makes it the natural opposite number to amefuri-kozō, the rain boy Sekien drew in the same 1779 book. He is a child servant of the rain god, wearing a paper umbrella, its ribs removed, as a hat. Between the two, Japanese weather had a yokai for both of its moods. A third, harsher relative belongs to the same family of ideas: hideri-gami, the drought god blamed when clear skies stop being pleasant and start being a crisis. Hiyoribō never carries that threat. It is fair weather with nothing asked of it in return.
Where it comes from
Almost everything known about hiyoribō comes from that single Sekien entry. No other report of it as a yokai is known. This is common in the Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki and the two catalogs that followed it. Many of their entries look like Sekien's own creations, built from an existing word or turn of phrase.
Here the word may be a nickname for the rain-stopping doll. In parts of Japan, people called the teru-teru-bōzu hiyori-bon, hiyori-bōzu, or hiyori-bon-san. The modern Nihon Kaii Yōkai Daijiten suggests the yokai is linked to those words.
The root word is hiyori (日和), plain Japanese for fine weather. The same root gives the language hiyorimi (日和見) — literally "weather-watching," and by long extension, sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way things go before committing to anything. Whether Sekien meant the pun, a mountain spirit that shows up only when conditions are agreeable and vanishes at the first sign of trouble reads like an illustration of the phrase.
The mountains named for it, in old Hitachi province, are today's Ibaraki, north-east of Edo — a stretch of the Kantō region better known for twin-peaked Mount Tsukuba than for any monster on its slopes. Sekien names no single mountain, only the deep mountains of Hitachi.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Hiyoribo in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779). This book has that picture, with its caption in English.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
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Hiyoribō today
The word hiyori never went anywhere. It still turns up in ordinary Japanese — koharu-biyori, a warm, clear day in early winter, or kōraku-biyori, weather good enough for an outing — long after most people who use those phrases have forgotten Sekien's mountain spirit. Japan also kept a more famous fair-weather charm: the teru-teru-bōzu, a small cloth doll still hung in windows the night before a school trip, meant to keep the rain away. Sekien's own caption links the two. It says people make paper monks to pray for sun, perhaps to honor hiyoribō's spirit. Modern scholars doubt the yokai is really the doll's origin. Still, the two share the same wish — for the sky to cooperate, just this once — that Sekien gave a shape to in the mountains of Hitachi in 1779.
