Yoshi vs. the Loch Ness Monster
This is the second of two semi-related follow-ups to my post about the Final Fantasy character Bahamut — which you should read, but you don’t have to in order to understand this one.
In researching the origins of Bahamut beyond Squaresoft lifting the character from Dungeons & Dragons, I learned that I’d been pronouncing this name wrong for years. In my head, I imagined it to be “ba-HA-mutt,” with emphasis on the middle syllable and with the last syllable rhyming with putt or butt. Apparently voice acting in later Final Fantasy games make it clear that the dragon’s name is supposed to sound more like the original Arabic it’s borrowed from, because it’s “ba-ha-MOOT,” with the emphasis on the final syllable and it sounding more like suit or toot. I don’t know why my English-programmed brain saw the name and decided it must be “ba-HA-mutt,” but if there’s one piece of localized text that cemented in my head that it should be this way, it was probably Super Mario RPG, the Nintendo/Squaresoft team-up that put Mario in an RPG setting but also imported bits and pieces from Final Fantasy.
One of these imports was Bahamutt, a generic enemy who appeared in the Bowser’s Keep area of the game. He’s just a red dragon that the English localization decided to tie to a famous Final Fantasy character by giving him a pun name.
In the Japanese version of Super Mario RPG, however, the character is not a reference to anything related to Squaresoft. No, the name is ドッシー or Dosshī, which is presumably a reference to Yoshi and also a nod to the fact that this enemy looks essentially like the Yoshi version of a dragon — same basic proportions, same rounded snout. The do syllable, then, probably comes from ドラゴン, doragon or “dragon.”
This plays into a naming trend in the Japanese versions of Mario games, where some dinosaur-like characters seem to be namechecking Yoshi. But as is often the case, it’s actually more complicated than that.
So where did Yoshi get his name?
Well, 義 (Yoshi) is a common Japanese male name, but in 2016, longtime Nintendo artist Yōichi Kotabe explained a different origin for Mario’s dino pal when he appeared as part of a panel discussion held by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, titled “The Age of Video Games: Japanese Games and Animation Spreading Around the World.” One of the many things disclosed during this talk was the fact Yoshi was named in honor of a female Nintendo employee, referred to only as Yoshimura-san, with her name being combined with that of Nessie, the creature allegedly living in Loch Ness, whose name is rendered in Japanese as ネッシー. (I’m assuming the employee is Mie Yoshimura, who received a special thanks credit on Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island and who also worked as an illustrator on Super Mario Kart.) Although Kotabe does not remark on this, the fact that Yoshi’s name is pronounced somewhat similarly to the Japanese interjection 良し (yoshi), meaning something like “alright!” or “okay!” and coming the adjective 良い, meaning “good,” just adds another layer of meaning to the name.
Obviously, Yoshi proved to be a successful addition to Nintendo’s roster of recurring characters. Although his name was sometimes romanized as Yossy in early Japanese materials — read the Legends of Localization explainer for why that is as well as why Yossy isn’t more technically correct — it’s the katakana for his name, ヨッシー, that is more interesting for the purposes of this post. Basically, these katakana have come to be a de facto suffix in the Mario games that has something to do with dragons or dinosaurs, though not necessarily with Yoshi specifically.
The first instance of this is Dorrie, the water beast who first appeared in Super Mario 64. If Yoshi was inspired in part by Nessie, then Dorrie is Nintendo doubling down on that, putting a much more literal representation of Nessie into the games. In Super Mario 64, Dorrie is only similar to Yoshi in that they’re both apparently some kind of dinosaur and that Mario rides on their backs, though in Dorrie’s case it’s not done with a saddle like with Yoshi. In function and essence, Dorrie is a plesiosaur, the Japanese name for which is 首長竜, literally “long neck dragon,” and the Super Mario Wiki page points out that this is likely the reason the Japanese text in Super Mario 64 refers to him as a かいりゅう (海竜) — kairyū or “sea dragon.”
Dorrie’s Japanese name is actually the same as Bahamutt’s Japanese name: ドッシー or Dosshī, which you’d be inclined to think also comes from a combination of Yoshi and dragon, with the dragon in question being the “long neck dragon” plesiosaur instead of a more standard RPG boss dragon. However, given Dorrie’s function in the game as a stand-in for Nessie, I think her Japanese name is comes from combining with Nessie’s name, ネッシー, withドラゴン, doragon or “dragon.” Dorrie wasn’t conceived as being all that Yoshi-like, and I don’t think her name is supposed to reference Yohsi’s. Her name, like Yohsi’s name, is a refference to Nessie’s.
Left: Dorrie as she originally appeared in Super Mario 64. Right: The Yoshi-fied update she got starting in Super Mario 64 DS.
This gets confused later on, as Dorrie made several appearances in games after Super Mario 64, but the remake of that game, Super Mario 64 DS, featured an updated design that made Dorrie look more like Yoshi, with a rounder snout. She also sported a pair of goggles that were lifted directly from the Dolphin characters that debuted in Super Mario World and that function as lifts in several stages. (Notably, they don’t have a generic name in Japan; they are リフトン, “Rifuton” or “Lifton,” presumably “lift” plus the last syllable from dolphin.) As a commenter pointed out on this post, Dorrie’s name in a pre-release version of Super Mario 64 was Dolphie (ドルフィー), so perhaps the connection goes back to the very beginning, but it’s also possible that the Super Mario 64 DS team saw Dorrie’s Japanese name, presumed it had to be a reference to Yoshi and then gussied her up to fit that association.
Super Mario 3D World introduced a new water-faring dinosaur character whose Japanese name is structured similarly. Plessie is known in Japan as プレッシー or Puresshī, seemingly a combination of plesiosaur and that same suffix. He is designed to look somewhat like Yoshi, with a big, rounded snout similar eyes, and again Mario rides on his back, though saddle-less like he does with Dorrie. However, in overall function Plessie is actually more like a Nessie than he is a Yoshi, and I think his name reflects this.
Plessie in Bowser’s Fury, and I can name as many reasons for why he looks like Yoshi as I can ones he seems to be styled not to look like Yoshi.
I make this weird distinction of Dorrie and Plessie being references to Nessie instead of to Yoshi, necessarily, because there are a whole host of dinosaur-like characters who look more or less like Yoshi but whose names don’t fit the pattern. Not counting Birdo, who predates Yoshi and in some ways acts like a predecessor to Yoshi, there are two in Super Mario World: Blargg, the lava dinosaur, and Rex, the purple dino baddie, both of whom also roughly match Yoshi’s basic proportions. They’re not part of the -sshi suffix family, however, with Blargg’s Japanese name being ウンババ, Unababa, and Rex’s being ドラボン, Dorabon. And Glydon, the flying lizard buddy introduced in Super Mario Odyssey, is known in Japan as カックー, or Kakkū, presumably from 滑空 (kakkū, “gliding”).
Essentially, a lot of Yoshi-looking dinosaurs don’t follow the naming convention and the ones that do are more like Nessie. Yoshi isn’t all that much like the Loch Ness Monster, I guess, but we have Kotabe’s comment confirming the connection anyway.
So what gives?
Apparently the -sshi suffix exists in Japanese outside of the Mario games, most famous in the lore around Lake Ikeda, a 16-square mile body of water on the southern tip of Kyūshū. In 1978, there were multiple sightings of a saurian monster living in the lake, and that creature was named Issie (イッシー or Isshī), a combination of the lake’s name and Nessie’s Japanese name. And that’s not all. There’s also Kussie, said to inhabit Lake Kussharo in Hokkaido. It’s not even strictly a Japanese thing. There’s also Cressie, allegedly hiding in Crescent Lake in Newfoundland; Bessie, in Lake Erie’s South Bay; and Pressie, in Lake Superior. Earthbound, for what it’s worth, offers up one as well: Tessie, in that game’s Lake Tess, although it happens to share the name with the one allegedly living in Lake Tahoe.
All of these names seem to use Nessie’s name as a template. And it seems to be popular enough and understandable enough, at least to Japanese audiences, that when a name was needed for Yoshi, they turned to Nessie again, even if Yoshi was just a dinosaur and not a big, flippered thing living in a lake.
I think this is a case of a real world thing filtering through a game franchise in a way that makes it seem like it’s more Nintendo-specific than it actually is. According to the Japanese Wikipedia page for Nessie, lake monsters in general and Nessie specifically did experience a bit of a pop culture moment in Japan in the late 70s, with the popularity of such creatures allegedly waning through the 80s. But looking at how it persisted in Mario games at least, it seems like it remained well-known enough that they kept returning to it, hence the -sshi family of dinosaur characters.
There is one more example of this trend in Super Mario RPG, I should point out. Boshi, the rad, bad, spiked collar-wearing anti-Yoshi. In the Japanese version of the game, he’s ワッシー or Wasshi, presumably a combination of warui, “bad” and Yoshi’s name, making him essentially the Wario version of Yoshi.
Mario : Wario :: Yoshi : Boshi / Washi.
The fact this character, a blue recolor of Yoshi, is named directly for Yoshi probably explains why Bahamutt, a red recolor of Yoshi plus more bad boy flair, has a Japanese name that riffs on Yoshi’s name too, even if he doesn’t have much at all to do with Nessie. Of course, if you read my piece on Bahamut, you’d know the connection between fire-breathing dragons and aquatic monsters goes way back.
If you’re reading the end of this piece on Yoshi’s name and wondering why I haven’t mentioned the fact that his “official” name is allegedly T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas, that’s because I refuse to acknowledge this as cannon, and I encourage you to ignore it as well.
Miscellaneous Notes
While dragon in this post has mostly referred to “sea dragon”-type characters that look less like Yoshi, there are dragon associations with Yoshi going back to Super Mario World. The Dragon Coin collectable, for example, is called the same thing in Japan, essentially: ドラゴンコイン or Doragon Koin.
Not all lake monsters follow the naming pattern described in this post, of course. Lake Champlain, located on the New York-Vermont border, has the name Champy, presumably because Chessie or Champsie are not at as catchy.
Finally, there is Ogopogo, who is both a boss in Final Fantasy IV and a lake monster said to inhabit Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. Ogopogo has a single other claim to video game history, however: as the namesake to the Ogopogo Examiner, a promotional newsletter that Squaresoft produced between 1992 and 1994, the entire run of which is scanned and preserved here.