IPPONDATARA

Lore

Ippondatara (本踏鞴) translates literally as "forge press." The yokai's very name ties its essence to the grueling craft of blacksmithing, while its chosen haunts-high mountain passes once lined with ore pits and crude smelters-set the scene.

There the legend of a one-legged, one-eyed spirit that appears only once a year first took shape. These passes, often shrouded in mountain mists, were the industrial centers of ancient Japan, and the spirit is thought to be the manifested soul of a master smith who died at his forge.

The classic description stresses two anatomical anomalies: Ippondatara has a single massive leg and one huge eye. Folklore paints them as occupational injuries-an eye seared blind from staring into a white-hot furnace, a leg wasted by decades of stamping the bellows pedal.

The creature moves in great hops and lumbering tumbles; every thrust shakes the ground, and in snow or wet earth it leaves the distinctive print of a single foot, the surest sign that the yokai is near. Almost always it carries an enormous smith's hammer, sometimes rimmed in flame, which it uses to startle or threaten those who intrude upon its domain.