Ronald
Morse, ed., trans., Folk Legends from
Tono (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 118. [A translation of Tono monogatari shui (1935), a Japanese tale
collection by Yanagita Kunio and Sasaki Kizen.] “This took place in the 1870s.
A rumor spread from village to village that the “fat collector”…was
coming….[P]eople were very frightened and thought that the “fat collector” got
fat out of the children by poking them with the skewers. It was said that the “fat
collectors” wore blue overalls and blue coverings on the back of their hands.”
