Heike-gani

In the year 1185, the emperor of Japan happened to be a little boy aged 7 with the name Antoku , leader of a clan of samurai called the Taira or Heike , who were fighting a long and bloody war with the Minamoto -clan. Each of the clans claimed the imperial throne. The war was decided by a naval battle in Dan-no-ura channel in the SE Seto Inland Sea. The Heike eventually got outnumbered and lost high numbers of troops. The few samurai that survived this midieval clash wanted to die an honourful death and threw themselves into the water and comitted suicide by drowning. The grandmother of the emperor, settled the matter in order that she and Antoku would not be captured by the enemy and took the boy-emperor in her arms and drowned herself together with her adorable son and his samurai-troops.

What happened next is told in the mythical story “The Tale of the Heike” or “heike monogatari” : As the entire Heike navel fleet was destroyed, only a handful women survived. These so-called ladies-in-waiting of the imperial court sold flowers and other offerings to the fishermen who fished the former battle ground. The Heike-clan and their story almost completely vanished from local and world history if it wasn't thanks to those brave and grieving ladies-in-waiting and their children. They established a ceremony with the fishermen of the area for the seamen and warriors that lost their lives during that dreadful day in 1185. The ceremony is as far as we could trace still held at the Akama shrine in Shimonoseki. Local fishermen who are decendents of those first fishermen dress in black headgear and proceed to the Akama shrine which contains the mausoleum of the devoted boy-emperor where they watch and perform a play depicting the events that followed the battle.

For centuries, people imagined that they could discern ghostly samurai armies vainly striving to bail the sea, to cleanse the blood and defeat and humiliation. The fishermen say the Heike samurai wander the bottoms of the Inland Sea still, but in the form of crabs. There are crabs to be found here with curious markings on their backs, patterns and indentations that disturbingly resemble the scowling face of a samurai warrior mask.

This crab is known to science as Dorippe frascone (Herbst, 1795) (syn: Heikea japonica von Siebold, 1824), is endemmic to certain parts of the Seto Inland Sea and the Philippines. But it is only in the type locality of the Seto Inland Sea where they have the clear and distinct markings due to artificial selection over the last 800 years. They live on rocky bottoms, often covered with hydrocoralia. Those areas are often avoided by fishermen as their nets get tangle up or damaged easily.

The story of the battle and the myth of the heike crab is beautifully illustrated in traditional Japanese prints from famous artists such as Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) and his teacher Kunijoshi and remains till this day a popular topic for traditional Japanese artists. The species was portrayed for the second time after its description in Europe in an early 20th century pamflet of a European curiosity collector and naturalist as “the crab with the human face”. The crabs were displayed to everyones wonder. This famous collection is lost since WWII. The crab is still a symbol in a popular Japanese computer game called “Shogun TotalWar”. The Heike crab was used by Carl Sagan in his popular science television show “ Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" as an example of unintentional artificial selection as the crabs with shells resembling Samurai have a greater chance of reproducing as they are usually thrown back into the sea.

The specimens were caught by a local fisherman from Kobe , chartered operation in the W Seto Inland Sea, Yanai area, Kagayaki Prefecture, Japan for NaturalArt.be at 80 m by means of bottom beam trawl on the 15/06/2005 .