samurai crab

8/9/2019 Samurai Crab

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The Samurai

rab

y Joel

W.

Martin

the Heike and

1185, with the defeated

into crabs as

1797-

and because of the stylized

the Heike legend was firmly

cond, alth ough th e artist

ith the story, he was less

crabs; the ones in the

ing belong to a t least two

family for the tru e

a b (H eikeajaponica). The

those on t he real samurai crab,

oser to the ship are possibly

ers of th e fam ily Grapsidae, as

ore rectangular and

looks at all like a Dorippidae. the

the samurai crab.

Morning arrived

cold

andgray, with the wavespomis-

ing

more storms to came. It was April, in the year 1185,

and the southern Inland Sea o fJapan

was

noplace for

the meek. Ships stirred restlessly, and trwbled voices

carried softly across the waters in the small inlet named

Dan-no-ura. The EmperorAntoku looked out from his

flagship across the sea and knew that

his

death, and the

death o f his people, was approaching from the

east.

For

nearly t tyyears now the s t m ~ l ead raged between

hispeople, the Heike or House oflaira, and the w a w h

known as the Genji, orM+amto Clan, from the east-

ernprovinces.

At

stake was nothing less than total eon

trol of the world as they knew it.

Antoku no longer held

out

any hope for sur-

row/.

All omens had been wrong. TheprCTMus day had

seen an enonnous school of dolphin approachin4 his lag-

ship, marked b y ~ r yanners with the stylized butterfly

o

of the House

of

Taira. The Royal Diviner had been

requested. His prediction: that

i f

the school of dolphin

divided and went around the ship, the Heike m f d

survive, but i f they dived beneath the waves, so

too

would the Heike warrWrsgo down in defeat.

The dolphin had dived before even reaching

the Emperor's vessel.

Antoku surveyed the scene around him. One

thousand ships made up the Heike

fleet,

and each bore

samurai trained w battle. But across the waves, ap-

proaching

s

me with the oncoming storm, were three

thousand ships of the

Gn$.

Antoku turned, his very

small hands clutching the dove-grey robe that denoted

hisstatus, his Im8 black hair man'ng in the dampwind.

Behind

him

was the nun

o f

the second order, who

approathed him and wrapped his small body in her awn

flomng robe. ((Grandmother,where are you taking

me? asked the Emperor, to which she replied, There s

another kingdom, beneath the waves . And clutch-

in the boy or the Emperor was but nineyears old

to her breast, she disappeared aver the side o f the ship,

taking with her the last hope of the House

o f

Taira. The

subsequent massacre of the Heike was both quick and

brutal. one of the samurai survived, and only a ew

o f

the wives and consorts were allowed to live, claimed s

spoils of battle by the

vi torious

Genji. The war was over.

The Heike were no more, and the Genji would rule

Japan forever.

T E R R V O L 3 1 N O 4 S U M M E R

9 9 3

H E A B O V E STORY S

TRUE

There was indeed a large-scale

naval encounter in the small

bay called Dan-no-ura, so uthern In land

Sea

of Ja-

pan, in the spring of 1185 (in some references

March, in others April), and the outcome of the

battle was a decisive victory for the Genji. More

important, though, than establishing the Genji as

the ruling parry, the battle marked the end of the

Age

of Courtiers in Japan (A.D. 710-1185), with

power transferring from the c ourt aristocracy o the

warrior class, a nd ushering in the age of the

military

leaders, or shoguns. C alled by historians the period

of M edieval and Feudal Japan , the shogunate was

to last unt il 1868 . History tells us, th rough several

extant versions of the

Heike w a t o r i

story of the

Heike), that the Genji arrived in a storm and there-

fore surprised the Heike, that th e Emperor Anroki

was only nine, that he (or at least his guardian;

chose de ath over defeat. a nd th at those loval Heikt

samurai not choosing death by their own

hands

were thrown into the sea by the conquerors. The

events are not difficult

to

believe; it is the nature 1

man to war. But the tale has generated other storic

that are not true, and they are the subject of this

essay.

The first story generated by the events

depicted in the

Heike monogatmi

is that the Heike

still live on the floor of the Sea of Japan. Actually.

some survivors of the Heike lineage d o survive,

and

they commem orate in April o f each year the battle

of Dan-no-ura, and the events that followed th

massacre, in coastal Japanese villages. But what

lives on the floor of th e Sea of Japan and surround-

ing bodies o f water are not people, but crabs. Ac-

cording to the

myth,

these crab s are the ghostsof

the Heike warriors. hideouslv transformed

after

their loss and doomed t o walk the abyss for ll time.

H ow could such a myth originate?Actu-

ally, it is easy to see. These crabs, whose scientific

name was until recently

Donae japica,

have

pattern of grooves and ridges on their backs that

bear an uncannv resemblance to a human face

more precisely, they resemble the grimacing face

of

a samurai warrior. The se are samurai crabs,

known

throughout the Orient as Heike-tfani, he crab o f

the Heike.

I

do not know when this myth first

ap

peared. There is no mention of samurais turning

into crabs in the versions of the Heike mmuyatUnI

have seen. But the legend must be fairly old; al

thoug h the exact date of th e painting depicting

this

even t on the opp osite page is no t known, the Japa-

nese artist, U tagaw a Kuniyoshi, lived from 1797to

1861. Furtherm ore, the stylization of this painting

indicates that the story o n which it was basedwas

no t new but had been ha nded d ow n from previous



aponica, show ing on its back

eas of th e

s specimen is a

d in Ariake Bay, o ff

Japan, in 1968, on loan to

tural History Museum from the

museum van N atuurlihk e Historie,

, The Netherlands. Total w idth

t (the cheeks of the face) is only

ting for its small

generations. And there arc other old references

pointing ou t th e similarity of these crabs t human

faces. In the Wakan-sansai-zuc, the second encyclo-

pedia published in Japan

1716),

there are iltustra-

tions of

D aponica

which at the time was called

either Takebun-gani, after Takebun, who came t o

Japan at the time of the Mongolian invasion and

was drown ed, or Shimam ura-gani, after Danjo Shi-

mamura, slain in the fourth year of th e Kyoroku era

an d whose spirit was said

to

hover about the area.

Indeed, it seems likely that the man-crab legend

even precedes the date of the battle of Dan-no-

mura, and was merely fitted to those events later,

rather than being newly created a t that time. And it

is no t difficult

to

see ho w fishermen aro und the Sea

of Japan could see these crabs and envision the

reincarnation of the lost Heike samurai. The red

coloration o f these crabs in life was also tho ught

to

reflect the Heike, as some versions of the

Hezke

mmwtfatori

list red as the color of the flags of the

Ho use of Taira.

Th e second myth is that the crabs did no t

always look like they d o now. Rather, the st ory

goes, the resemblance to a human face, and espe-

cially

to

a samurai face, was created by artificial

selection. Artificial selection is man's version ofnat-

ural selection, where certain lineages su n ' e no t

because of th e forces of nature, bu t by man's in ter-

vention. Examples are very common; all domestic

animals are the result o f purposeful intervention

(selective breeding) by man. According to the

samurai crab story, Japanese fisherman, who have

plundered these waters for thousands of years,

would throw back any crab caught in their net if it

resembled a hum an face, especially the facc o f the

long lost Hcike, keeping and eating only those

crabs that did not make them feel cannibalistic.

Man y years of th ro wi ng back faced crabs and weed-

ing o u t (eating) norm al crabs resulted in the faced

crabs being the major contributors to the gene

pool, with man in the role of a selective force

shaping subsequent populations: a very pretty ex-

amp le of evolution over a relatively shor t time span,

and o ne o f sufficient interest to have filtered down

to popular articles on natural history. In fact, the

well-known evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley

(grandson of the more famous T. H. Huxley, who

was known as Charles Darwin's bulldogn for his

adamant support

of

Darwin's then-controversial

ideas abou t natural selection, and brother o f the nov-

elist Aldous Hu xley) wr ote a bou t these crabs in Life

magazine in 1952 statin g that the resemblance of

D e

to an

ngry

Japanese warrior is far too spccif-

ic and far to o detailed t o e accidental; it is a specific

adaptation which can only have been brought about

by means o f natural selection operatin g over centuries

of time. It came about because those crabs with

a

more perfect re semblance t o a warrior's facc were less

frequently eaten than th e others. Mo re recently,

samurai crab s were used t o illustrate t he power of

artificial selection in Carl Sagan's popular 1980 ook

Cosmos. Both accounts make for interesting reading,

and

tell the story of crabs turned into samurai

likenesses by human hands.

Interesting reading, bu t it isn't true.

The grooves and ridges on the backs

of

crabs have specific purposes and are not merely

decorative. T he g rooves are external indications

of

supportive ridges, called apodcmes, inside the

crab's c arapace th at serve as sites for muscle attach-

ment. Elevated areas between these grooves allow

for an increase in interna l space, so that the various

T E R R A V O I . 3 1 N O

S U M M K S

9 3



.

Nineteenth-centurywoodblock Kabu~i

prin t by Utagaw a Toyokuni Ill.

Although Heikea aponica is the best

kno wn of the faced crabs, several

I

other species have a carapace (shell)

tha t bears a likeness to a hum an face

when viewed from above. On the top

is Paradorippe granulata, a no rthwes t-

ern Pacific species that, like H

aponica, bears an obvious resem-

blance to the scowling face o f a

samurai warrior. In the cen ter is

Doripp e sinica, know n only from

Japan, a species with markings that

are similar to, but less distinct than,

those of H aponica and P granulate.

On the b otto m is the northeastern

Atlantic Corystes cassivelaunus, a

species unrelated to the doripp ids (it is

I

a member of the family Corystidae)

bu t nevertheless bearing markings

I

slightly reminiscent of a hum an face

on its back because of similar

function al constraints of the carapace.

Perhaps because the similarity t o a

human face is weak, one of the

common names for this species s

masked crab. Specimens courtesy of

Dr. Lipke Holthuis and

C H J M

Fransen, Nation al Museum of Natura l

History, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Photos by Dick Meier.

T E R R V N O S U M M E R I ?



parts of a crab's viscera astric, hepa tic, cardiac,

branchial, etc. -are reflected externally. This is no t

to say that these structures are unaffected by selec-

t i o n . ~ h e ~re as subject to evolutionary pressures

as any other feature of a crab. T he p oint here is that

these ridges and grooves occur in nearly all mem-

bers of the crab family Dorippidae, whether they

live near Japan or not. As pointed ou t by the great

Japanese carcinologist Tune Sakai, there are at least

17

different species of crabs in two families in the

Indo-West Pacific that are similar enough to be

called

Heikegani

by local residents, and there are

many related species from o the r far off waters that

bear a likenessto a human face. Many Asian coun-

tries have vernacular names to account for the simi-

larity of such crabs to a human face, such

as

the

Chinese name Kuei Lien Hsieh (Gho st or D emon

faced crab), and in several countries th e crabs play a

prominent role in local folklore, sometimes being

considered sacred, with the face representing that

of a deceased relative. In th e northeast Atlantic, the

crab

Co ry~ es mivelaunus,

although only distantly

related t o dorippids (and belonging to a separate

family, the C orystidae), bears a sim ilar arrangement

of grooves and elevations of th e carapace that h ave

resulted in one of its comm on names, the masked

crab. Additionally, fossils of doripp id crabs or

closely related crab species are known from sites

predating man's appearance on earth. Furthermore,

and most damning to the myth of reincarnated

samurai warriors, the fisherman who make their

living from the Sea of Japan d o no t eat

any

of these

crabs. Whether they resemble a samurai, a human

face, or m erely a crab is a moo t point; all are thro

back. For

Don ppe japmica

reaches a maximum

of only

31 1.2

inches) across the back, not

all wor th t he tro uble of retrieving from the nets,

alone sorting throu gh t o see which ones resernbl

face and w hich d o not.

And yet the Heike will not b

A recent revision of the crab family D

found that the species

Donppe

several respects from other members

DonFpe o much so, in fact, t

to place the species in a separate higher

category (genus). And follow ing the rul

ity in handing out scientific name

Donppe must remain where i t was firs

sitating that a new name be created

date the sam urai crab.D

a1 Museum, performed th e transfer and p

the new name in 1990. And they chose

appropriate one: th e samurai

be known as

Heikea

Japan.

Joel Mamrtins Associate Curator o

oology

t

the Natwrcd istoryMuseum.

centers

round

the

evolution

and We

histon s

and branchiopod crustaceans.

p of southern Japan showing the

is today Shimonoseki in the

southern Inland Sea of Japan.

T E R R

V O L

31 . N O

S U M M R 9 9 3

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