Tsuchigumo

This term refers to a common practice among many of the rural clans: utilizing existing cave systems and creating fortified hollow earthen mounds for both residential and military purposes. This implies that the use of the name for renegade clans began essentially as a pun, and over time tales surrounding a literal race of intelligent, occasionally anthropomorphic, spiders grew from this historical usage, first as allegory, then as myth.

In the following examples from ancient historical records and accounts, tsuchigumo is used variously to describe well-known individual bandits, rebels, or unruly clan leaders, and also applied to clans as a whole. In some cases it is unclear in which way the term is being used. Its usage as a figurative term denotes that the person or clan referred to was defying Imperial authority in some covert but consistent fashion, generally by guerrilla warfare or actively eluding discovery.

In history

According to the 18th-century historian Motoori Norinaga, in ancient Japan, Tsuchigumo was used as a derogatory term against aborigines who did not show allegiance to the emperor of Japan.

There is some debate on whether the mythical spider-creature or the historical clans came first. One theory is based on the knowledge that beginning with the earliest historical records, those who waged war against the imperial court were referred to as oni by the imperial court, both in scorn and as a way to demonize enemies of the court by literally referring to them as demons. Tsuchigumo may have been a pre-existing but obscure myth picked as the term of choice for a more humble threat to the empire, after which it was popularized. Alternately, the word tsuchigumo has been identified a derivation of an older derogatory term, tsuchigomori (土隠), which roughly translates as "those who hide in the ground".

Tsuchigumo

The Japanese name for large ground-dwelling tarantulas, ōtsuchigumo, is due to their perceived resemblance to the creature of the myth, rather than the myth being named for the spider. Japan has no native species of tarantula,[citation needed] and the similarities between the mythical and the actual creature—huge wandering spiders with an obvious face that like to hide in burrows—were entirely coincidental. The fact that the later iterations of the myth specifically refer to the body being that of a tiger, however, does imply that the description was influenced to some degree by the Chinese bird spider, which is commonly referred to as the "earth tiger" in its native habitat for its furry, prominently striped body and aggressive disposition.