"The Marimo of Lake Akan" - An Ainu Legend

One day, when the god of Lake Akan was going for a walk around his lake, he accidentally stepped on a water chestnut, called pekanpe in Ainu. It stabbed his foot with a prickly stinging sensation. The god had already disliked water chestnuts, but from then on, he began to see them as a nuisance.

The water chestnuts tried to appease the god and pleaded to be moved into the lake, but the god refused. “If I put you in the lake, the lake would become dirty, and humans who try to enter the lake to gather you would only further soil the lake. I cannot grant your wish,” the god said, harshly rejecting the desperate pleas of the water chestnuts.

The water chestnuts waited and waited, but their wish remained ungranted. Finally, the water chestnuts grew angry. They snatched the weeds growing from the lake shore, balled them up, and threw them into the lake. Then, the water chestnuts left.

It’s said that the weeds that were thrown into the lake became what we now know as marimo. The Ainu call them tōrasanpe—goblins of the lake—and have long since disliked them.

Excerpt translated from: 更科源蔵　アイヌ伝説集より　アイヌの伝説　ページ30-31

Translator’s note: Marimo are unique, spherical, slow-growing algae balls that are native to only a few lakes and rivers in Japan and Northern Europe. Due to human activity, marimo populations have declined and Lake Akan is one of the few places in the world that you can find them. Marimo are sometimes referred to as “moss balls” in English, but they are not, in fact, made of moss. Marimo roughly translates to “ball algae”, and they were coined by Takiya Kawakami, a Japanese botanist. The term marimo has become used even in English to refer to these algae balls.