Koopa vs. Kappa

You’ve got your Koopa. And you’ve got your kappa. They sound alike. They kind of look alike. Surely, they must be related, right? Not so fast.

To quickly recap the previous post, the Super Mario Bros. big bad was called Koopa in Japan but Bowser in English-speaking territories, and that happened because basically everyone except Mario and Luigi got new names when the game was localized. During this process, someone at Nintendo of America made the decision to re-use Bowser’s Japanese name for the generic grunts of the evil turtle army: the Koopa Troopa.

Now, the decision to call them Koopa Troopas is notable for a few reasons. In the previous post, I argue that it’s such an effective coinage that it made it impossible for Nintendo to rebrand Bowser with his Japanese name the way the company did with Princess Peach back in the 1990s. The western name also preserves a link that is more or less lost in the Japanese naming convention. In the game that proceeded Super Mario Bros., 1983’s Mario Bros., the turtle enemies aren’t called Koopa Troopas yet but Shellcreepers, and Miyamoto has explicitly stated that he created Bowser as a bigger, badder version of these — hence the original, temporary name for him, Boss Creeper. In English, this relationship gets reflected in the name, where Bowser is the King of the Koopa and therefore the boss of the Koopa Troopas, but in Japan the Koopa Troopas are called Nokonoko (ノコノコ), from a Japanese term meaning “the state of being indifferent to one’s surroundings and walking around,” which is to say the name doesn’t tie back to the big guy in charge.

This post, however, will focus on one weird side-effect of calling them Koopa Troopas in English-speaking territories — not to mention a lot of non-English-speaking ones that just translated that name. As a result, this made for a false association with a creature that gamers and fans of Japanese culture would eventually encounter: the kappa (河童), a more or less turtle-looking entity that according to Japanese folklore lives in rivers, eats cucumbers and drowns children. The kappa sports a dish-like depression on its head that contains water. If the water dries up or is spilled, the kappa either is weakened or dies outright.

In more recent decades, the kappa’s activities have evolved from menacing to something a lot cuter and more family-friendly, and it’s now one of the most popular creatures from Japanese folklore. According to this Nippon.com article on the evolution of the kappa as a pop cultural figure, they’d been depicted as less threatening in illustrated books going back to the Edo period. In the 1950s, however, the popular comic Kappa Tengoku, by Shimizu Kon, further familiarized people with a version of the kappa that was less scary, less likely to drown somebody.

If you encounter enough Japanese culture — in the form of video games, anime, manga or something else — you will eventually encounter the kappa. Myself, I first encountered them by name in Final Fantasy VI, where they’re localized as imps except in one scene, where the original, Japanese name is used when one of them presents a gameplay tutorial.

After learning about kappa from Final Fantasy VI, I realized I’d encountered them in other games, including but not limited to series with explicit Japanese flair. Having made these kinds of connections between different video game franchises, I’d imagine it would be easy — logical, even! — to look at the Koopa Troopas in the Super Mario games and assume they are also a manifestation of the kappa. The names do sound a great deal alike.

Not a coincidence: Kappa enemies in Ganbare Goemon (left) and Pocky & Rocky (right).

Officially, that is not the case, however.

In Japan, the name Koopa was only intended to refer to the big bad turtle king, who doesn’t look or act much like a kappa at all. He has horns, he’s a hulking physical presence and he’s more associated with fire than he is water. Besides, his name comes from the Japanese rendering of the Korean dish gukbap. The things we call Koopa Troopas in the west do look a little like kappa, but the people who created them never intended them to have that name. Moreover, Japan doesn’t generally use the name Koopa as a catchall for the range of evil turtle-like creatures the way we use it in the west. Instead, the larger species name is the Turtle Tribe (either カメ族, Kame-zoku, or カメ一族, Kame-ichizoku).

This is all complicated by the fact that Nintendo has another franchise that gives kappa a prominent role — and again, it may be the way some people otherwise unfamiliar with Japanese culture first discovered these creatures. Animal Crossing features a family of kappa that live alongside the other, non-fantastical animal species, the most famous of which is Kapp’n, who pilots boats and drives other forms of transportation. In the English version of the game, he talks like a sailor and sings like one too. (This is a good way to localize this character’s water affiliation, BTW, even if he’s driving a bus.)

With that yellow beak, Kapp’n also looks a little like a Koopa Troopa, and in the English version of the game, Kapp’n and his kin are just explained away as being turtles. (They’re actually the only turtles in the series. Tortimer, notably, is a tortoise.) But even then, Kapp’n still mentions a fondness for cucumbers in the English translation and there’s no effort to disguise the “water dish” depression on top of his head. If you know about kappa, you can figure out that Kapp’n is one, in the same way that Tom Nook is actually a tanuki and not a raccoon.

I suppose you could argue that kappa are such a part of Japanese culture that they would serve as an inspiration, by default, for any reptile-like or amphibian-like creature that walks on its hind legs and sports a shell on its back, even if the creator doesn’t acknowledge it. (Okay, maybe not Gamera?) This might explain why Shigeru Miyamoto decided that Kuppa was the best name to give this character over the two alternate choices he was considering, even if his mind was on Korean beef dishes at the time. Kuppa might have resonated with him because he knew he was designing a turtle-like monster and this name just sounded right, even if it wasn’t a deliberate association. This could also be why Koopa Troopas eventually started walking on their hind legs instead of on all fours, because the association between them and kappa seemed so natural that they just evolved to take on additional kappa-like qualities.

Kappa do have an explicit place in the Super Mario games, however, even if they weren’t necessarily on Miyamoto’s mind back in the day. In Super Mario Bros. 3, for example, the third of the Mushroom Kings has been transformed into what looks like a turtle. Upon close inspection, however, that crown is covering up what looks like a water dish on his head. He’s probably a kappa, and that would make sense given that his kingdom is the water world.

As I mentioned in my history of the P-Wing, this king’s castle sits on a chain of islands that looks more or less like the islands that make up Japan. It makes sense, then, that they’d pick an explicitly Japanese creature for this king to turn into. This king is actually the only one of the seven in the game to get official art. It’s of his transformed form, and even trying to see him as a kappa, he actually looks more like a Koopa.

Given that one of Super Mario Bros. 3’s new powerups is the Frog Suit, you have to wonder if at any point Nintendo had planned for it to be a Kappa Suit that gave Mario the ability to swim better. Really, considering that the Tanooki Suit’s ties to Japanese folklore, it wouldn’t have been that out of place, at least in Japan. And besides, Nintendo had considered a Centaur Mario powerup, so the Frog Suit really is the odd one out in that it’s not based on a fantastical creature.

In Super Mario World, there’s an explicit reference to kappa in the game’s English-language instruction manual, and I’m surprised it made the cut, considering how few English-speaking players would have understood the reference back in the day. The mountain where the Yellow Switch Palace is located is identified as Kappa Mountain, because it looks like a kappa lying down. The first, smaller hill with the lake at the top looks exactly like a kappa’s head, complete with water dish, and the taller hill behind is the rest of the kappa’s body.

If anything, the fact that these explicit references to kappa exist in the games makes me even more sure that the series creators don’t think of the Koopa Troopa as being especially related to them — again, easy though the association might be to make.

Miscellaneous Notes

I assume the Japanese name Nokonoko came about because the most basic form of this creature, the green one, will walk in one direction mindlessly, but then again a lot of enemies in Super Mario Bros. do this. In fact, the red version of the Koopa Troopa is one of the few enemies not to nokonoko about because it actually will react to its surroundings — by stopping and turning around when it reaches the end of a ledge. But kind of like the Koopa-kappa thing, there is an unintentional association with this version of the name that’s kind of interesting. In the original English translation of Super Mario RPG, one of Mario’s weapons is a green Koopa shell that is labeled “the NokNok Shell.” It’s clearly a result of the localization team translating the character’s Japanese name instead of swapping it out for the longstanding English name, but seeing this in-game back in the day, I thought it was in reference to the fact that a Koopa shell, once kicked will knock against one thing and then the other until it’s stopped. Knock knock. Get it? It would make sense, but again, it’s a just a coincidence.

There’s one more bit of trivia hiding in the Super Mario World instruction manual. According to the English version, anyway, the sunken ship you trek though before you get to the Valley of Bowser is a crashed version of one of the airships from Super Mario Bros. 3. I was looking at the Japanese name for this stage to see if it’s mentioned there at all, and it’s not; however, the Japanese name for this area is slightly different: Sunken Ship of the Ramune Trench (ラムネかいこうのちんぼつせん or Ramune Kaikō no chinbotsu-sen). I guess it’s not surprising that this reference to the popular Japanese soft drink didn’t carry over to the English version, but it is one more food-inspired place name in this game. Given that ramune is likely a Japanese rendering of the English word lemonade, and that lemonade in some English-speaking territories refers to clear, carbonated soft drinks, it actually has a very similar name to the other body of water in the game, Soda Lake.

You might guess that kappa inspired the Zora characters in the Zelda series, and you’d probably be correct to an extent. But again, there’s a more explicit mer-thing that appears in a Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds that seems a closer: the Ku, which sport turtle-like shells. The Zora don’t. Still, both live in water and want to kill you so…

When I said any reptile- or amphibian-looking creature that walks on its hind legs and has a shell on its back must be inspired by kappa on some level, I guess I meant the ones coming from Japan specifically. But I was curious to see if this comes up in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, and it turns out it does. As near as I can tell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which were created in the U.S., were not inspired by the kappa, but their resemblance to them is actually a plot point in the third live-action movie.

TMNT III hit theaters in 1993, and this might also be how someone first learned about kappa, but I do wonder how much earlier it might have been mentioned, in one medium or another, that the turtle bros look like this Japanese folklore creature. Or is this the first?

In creating Bowser, Miyamoto was inspired by the Bull Demon King in the 1960 anime adaptation of Journey to the West localized in the west as Alakazam the Great. Another character in this story — Sha Wujing, known in the Japanese version as Sa Gojō — apparently takes on various kappa-like traits in various Japanese retellings, so I was curious to see if the movie version might have been an inspiration for the Koopa Troopas. They most likely weren’t. This Japanese version of the story keeps him closer to his Chinese origins, and he’s a man-eating sand ogre.

His body, his posture and the way he moves do remind me of the Bokoblins and or even the Breath of the Wild-era version of the Moblins, however.

I really struggled to come up with a creature that works in the U.S. like the kappa or other popular yokai does in Japan, where they’re not real but basically everyone with cultural awareness would recognize them, but I struggled to find one that felt right. I guess there’s bigfoot — and like the kappa, he gets used in cute or even commercial contexts — but bigfoot doesn’t feel uniquely American the way the kappa feels uniquely Japanese. Do we just not have anything analogous here?

If you liked this deep dive into Koopas and kappas, check out my posts about the Goomba: where the enemy came from and how its name might not be Italian. I’ve also got a detailed rundown on the enemies of Super Mario Bros. 2.

Miscellaneous Notes

Christmas Eve on Shooting Star Summit

Bowser vs. Koopa