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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
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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
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.
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 ?
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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