---
title: The jinmenju tree
type: Legend
description: The Japanese "human-faced tree" whose fruit ripen as smiling faces, the eastern, Sinic branch of the same human-faced-tree motif.
resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmenju
tags: [japan, jinmenju, yokai, marvels]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# The jinmenju tree

The jinmenju (*人面樹*, "human-faced tree") is a marvel of Japanese lore: a tree whose fruit ripen in the shape of human faces. It is a close cousin of the [[waqwaq-tree|Waq-Waq tree]] of Arabic and Persian tradition, whose fruit grew as human heads, but the Japanese tree keeps only the gentlest part of the idea. Its faces do not speak or cry out. They smile, and they laugh, and a face that laughs too hard is said to loosen and drop from the branch.

The tree is known chiefly from two Edo-period works. The illustrated encyclopedia *Wakan Sansai Zue* (和漢三才図会), compiled by the Osaka physician Terajima Ryōan and finished about 1712, drew heavily on Chinese sources and placed the human-faced tree among the wonders of distant lands. The artist Toriyama Sekien then gave it lasting form in his *Konjaku Hyakki Shūi* (今昔百鬼拾遺), a catalogue of spirits printed about 1781, where the *jinmenju* grows in deep mountain valleys, its fruit each wearing a face that laughs in silence.

## Chinese antecedents

Sekien set the tree in the far south, in the region the Chinese knew as Lingnan, and the motif has a long Chinese background. Southern China gave the name *renmianzi* (人面子, "human-face fruit") to a real tree of the region, whose hard fruit stone carries a marking that resembles a small face, and alongside it ran older tales of flowers and fruit that bore human features. The Japanese encyclopedists reached the image through these Chinese books rather than through the Arabic geographers, so the jinmenju is best understood as the eastern, Sinic branch of the same widespread idea.

## Relation to Waq-Waq

The human-faced or talking tree appears across a broad band of Eurasian writing, from the [[speaking-tree|oracular tree]] that warned Alexander to the crying fruit of the [[ajaib-al-makhluqat|wonders-of-creation literature]]. The jinmenju is the motif's quietest form, shorn of prophecy and lament. There is also a loose geographic echo: among the places medieval Arab writers proposed for the land of [[islands-of-waqwaq|Waq-Waq]] was Japan itself, a reading argued by Michael Jan de Goeje from the name's resemblance to a Cantonese form for the Japanese islands. The connection is one of shared imagination rather than direct descent, but it sets the laughing tree of the Japanese mountains in the same long tradition.
