There's an old Japanese legend, centuries old, about a monster, a giant, a salamander who came out of the river to terrorize the countryside, to eat horses and cattle alive, to ravage the land.

An oversized animal with an insatiable appetite for destruction. How could this story be more quintessentially Japanese, right?

Well, enter samurai.

Mitsui Hikoshiro, the honorable warrior who bravely faced death to stop this monster.

The story goes that he approached this gargantuan beast, fully armed, and then stepped inside the mouth of the salamander.

Obligingly, the creature swallowed him whole.

Hikoshiro then cut his way out from the inside, killing the beast, and saving the town.

Their enemy had been vanquished, and so the village relaxed.

Hikoshito settled in to the role of hero. Everything seemed more or less like a happily ever after.

But the story didn't end there. Hikoshito died, spontaneously, inexplicably. Then, the other villagers started to die, too. The crops began to

fail, their animals fell ill, famine and drought descended upon the city. The salamander's

spirit was after revenge. They had to do something to placate the beast,

and so they built a shrine, a memorial for the monster, a token of appeasement.

This fable probably isn't real, but the shrine is.

It still stands, in fact, in Manoa City.

You could go visit it if you wanted to.

The people of Manoa, to this day, hold a festival every August to celebrate this giant salamander, who they call Hzaki. They sing, as you heard, and dance,

pulling two massive 30-foot floats each in the image of the massive creature.

And the Hanzaki, in a way, is real.

Not in the horse-eating way, or even in the leaving the waterway, they almost never do,

but real in the sense that there is a freakishly large amphibian in Japanese rivers.

English speakers call their monster the Japanese giant salamander. Yes, the horrendously

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