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A long, long time ago the lord of the
castle sent a servant to the village headman to tell him, “I would like to see your
village.” The village headman considered this a great honor, so he gathered the
villagers and consulted them on what kind of hospitality they should show their
lord. They decided that making the lord’s favorite food would please him best,
so the village headman asked the servant what his lord’s favorite food was. The
servant told him that it was grated Japanese radish. The village headman did
not know how to make grated Japanese radish. So once again the village headman
gathered the villagers and consulted them. “Grated Japanese radish is made by
gnawing on a Japanese radish and spitting it out again,” said one of the
villagers. That seemed simple enough, so the village headman asked the
villagers to bring him a Japanese radish as quickly as possible and together
the villagers prepared grated Japanese radish by gnawing on it and spitting it
out again.
The lord visited the village soon after and
he was presented with the grated Japanese radish. He was exceedingly pleased.
“This is very good, very good indeed,” he said. After his lord returned to the
castle, the servant asked the village headman, “How did you make such delicious
grated Japanese radish?”
When the
village headman told him how the villagers had gnawed on the radish and then
spit it out again, the lord’s servant was very angry.
After all the work they had done to please their
lord, their efforts had produced the opposite result. So once again, the
village headman and his villagers gathered. When the village headman visited
the castle to ask what he could do to beg for his lord’s forgiveness, he was told
to “draw up an official written apology and seal it in blood.” The word for
“blood seal” in Japanese is “keppan.”
The village headman
repeated this word over and over again all his way home. “Keppan? Ketsupan?” When
he returned to the village he proceeded to write his name and the name of the
villagers on a scroll and then gathered everyone together. Unfortunately the
village headman mistook the word for “blood” (“ketsu”) as “ketsu” the word for
“backside or bottom.” He called out everyone’s name and told the villagers to
roll up their clothes and dip their bottoms on the ink stone that he had
prepared. They placed their bottoms over their names to create a seal and
submitted the apology. The bottoms of the villagers were so black!
This is a humble story of uneducated people
from simpler times. The End
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