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Japanese Time Traveller who Vanished for 300 years – Urashima Tarō

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 14:44

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Urashima Tarō – Time travel

In Japan, the legend of Urashima Taro describes the tale of a fisherman’s visit to the protector god of the sea- Ryūjin in an underwater palace for what seemed like only three days. When he returns to his fishing village, he finds that it’s been 300 years that he’s been gone. Everything that he knew of was long gone, his family, friends and his way of life, everything had changed in what seem to be for him only a few days.

One day a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō is fishing when he notices a group of children torturing a small turtle. Tarō saves it and lets it to go back to the sea. The next day, a huge turtle approaches him and tells him that the small turtle he had saved is the daughter of the Emperor of the Sea, Ryūjin, who wants to see him to thank him.

The turtle magically gives Tarō gills and brings him to the bottom of the sea, to the Palace of the Dragon God. There he meets the Emperor and the small turtle, who was now a lovely princess, Otohime.

Tarō stays there with her for a few days, but soon wants to go back to his village and see his aging mother, so he requests Otohime’s permission to leave. The princess says she is sorry to see him go, but wishes him well and gives him a mysterious box called tamatebako which will protect him from harm but which she tells him never to open. Tarō grabs the box, jumps on the back of the same turtle that had brought him there, and soon is at the seashore.

He asks if anybody knows a man called Urashima Tarō. They answer that they had heard someone of that name had vanished at sea long ago. He discovers that 300 years have passed since the day he left for the bottom of the sea. Struck by grief, he absent-mindedly opens the box the princess had given him, from which bursts forth a cloud of white smoke. He is suddenly aged, his beard long and white, and his back bent. From the sea comes the sad, sweet voice of the princess: “I told you not to open that box. In it was your old age …