Once, in the province of Echigo, a farmer lived with his two sons. The farmer’s first wife and the mother of elder son was dead and the younger son’s mother was the mother then. The stepmother hated the elder brother. Her only concern was to somehow make her own son’s life comfortable and pleasant. So, she thought of a plan. She divided a patch of garden in the mountains into two and asked the two brothers to plant beans to judge who was better. At night, she went to the elder brother’s garden and dug up all of the beans that he had planted that day. The elder brother waited for a long time but the beans in his patch of garden did not sprout. The stepmother took the farmer to the garden and said, “He did not want to plant beans, anyway, and he took them somewhere and threw them away, I am sure.” She hoped that the farmer would punish him severely.
Hachikoku Mountain
The elder brother’s dead mother was possibly looking at him from heaven and came for his help. There was one bean left in the corner of the garden which the stepmother had not seen when she took the beans out. That one bean sprouted and began to grow bigger and bigger. Finally, it became a big tree even higher than the mountains. It looked as if its branches were reaching heaven. When autumn came, from this single tree they gathered eight koku (nearly forty bushels) of beans. The stepmother’s plan failed. The mountain at this village is called Hachikoku which means ‘Eight koku’. The gate posts of Senpuku-ji at Hojo were made from the trunk of this big tree when it was cut down.
