page_title: Momotarō
section_title: English translations
hierarchical_section_title: Momotarō / English translations
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover illustration for the chirimen book Japanese Fairy Tale Series, No. 1, "Momotaro". 1885 first edition.
context_page_description: Momotarō is a popular hero of Japanese folklore. His name translates as Peach Tarō, a common Japanese masculine name, and is often translated as Peach Boy. Momotarō is the title of various books, films and other works that portray the tale of this hero.
  There is now a popular notion that Momotarō is a local hero of Okayama Prefecture, but this claim was invented in the modern era, and not accepted as consensus in scholarly circles.
context_section_description: The story has been translated into English many times. "The Adventures of Little Peachling" appeared in A.B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan in 1871. William Elliot Griffis published a version in 1880, which remained obscure even to researchers, even though English translations in subsequent decades apparently borrowed from Griffis's phraseology and use of idiom, sometimes even copying outright.
  Rev. David Thompson's translation as "Little Peachling" appeared as the first volume of Hasegawa Takejirō's Japanese Fairy Tale series in 1885. A second edition appeared in 1886, with a different set of illustrations, drawn by Kobayashi Eitaku
  Susan Ballard included the tale in Fairy Tales from Far Japan (1899).
  Yei Theodora Ozaki included a loosely translated version in her Japanese Fairy Tales (1903); Ozaki's retellings were based on a version by "Sadanami sanjin" (sic., i.e., Sazanami Iwaya). Ozaki was credited with spreading Japanese folktales to the English-speaking nations by researchers such as Teiji Seta.
  There was another English translation that used the same source as Ozaki and published around the same time, namely, "The Story of Peach-Boy" in Iwaya's Fairy Tales of Old Japan (1903, repub. 1914) translated by Hannah Riddell. The translation of the collection was a collaborative effort with other translators, such as Fanny B. Greene, Tsuda Umeko and others. This latter effort was acknowledged by Iwaya himself.
  Teresa Peirce Williston in her Japanese Fairy Tales, Second Series, in 1911. And there are many other translations.
caption: English Momotaro published by Hasegawa Takejirō's Kōbunsha (1885, 1st edition)
exif: {"Image Tag 0x000B": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2019:04:24 00:59:19", "Image ExifOffset": "2242", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4516", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10568", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:04:24 00:56:26", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:04:24 00:56:26", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}