Cattail Which Turned Into Rabbit Fur
(Urawa City, Saitama pre. on Aug.4)
Cattail ears like sausage sprinkle seeds with fluff when they are ripe.
Their fluff reminds us of a tale known as "Inaba no Shiro-usagi"- A white rabbit in Inaba. This story appears in the books written in the 8th century.
One year a white rabbit who lived in inaba (The old name of part in East Tottori) drifted to Okinoshima, Oki islands (Shimane pre.) because of a flood.
The rabbit who wanted to go back home hit upon an idea and asked a shark playing at the beach to compete each other for the number of friends. The shark gathered his peers and lined up from Oki islands to Inaba. The rabbit walked on their backs counting their number and reached the beach in Inaba. But when she landed on the beach, she made a ship of tongue and told she cheated them.
Then the sharks pulled out her hair without leaving a single one. And the gods of Izumo (The old name of part in East Shimane) passed by and told the rabbit that she should bathe in the seawater and expose her skin to the wind to cure her wound, which made her end up having much more pain.
After that, when she was crying, the god called Oookuninushi-no-mikoto passed by and told her to wash out salt with fresh water, roll on the fluff of cattails sprinkled over and quietly lie down at the place with no wind. In this way the rabbit was able to be back to what she was.
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