Meanwhile, this bus stop bench is associated with a legend about a sumo wrestler coming to town.
A certain Association in my town here put out a big, fat book of local folk tales. Sadly, most of them are lame or unoriginal, in the way that most folk tales are. I don't claim that this one is non-lame or original, but I found it slightly haunting. So let's all psychoanalyse me after reading my retelling of...

The Cedar and the Snake

East of S_____ Elementary School, there's a part of town that they used to call "Snake Field". Right in the middle of "Snake Field" there was single big cedar tree. Since there was nothing else around but flat fields and rice paddies, they say that it looked like a king surveying his domain.

But there was a sad story behind this tree and "Snake Field", and this is how it went.

Long ago, longer than anyone remembers, there was a very sensible and down-to-earth girl who lived in those parts. She was out cutting grass one day when a snake appeared.

She was not a foolish girl, so if this had been a normal snake she would have barely even noticed it -- but this snake had two heads. Even she jumped back in fright at the sight of it.

But then the snake raised its heads and began to slither towards her. It didn't wriggle from side to side, it wriggled up and down, and its red tongues kept flicking in and out like some kind of devil.

The girl ran for her life until she got home. But that very evening she caught a mysterious fever, and she died only a few days later.

They started calling that place "Snake Field" after that, and no-one dared go near it. Still, someone -- who knows who? -- did go out and plant that cedar there, as a memorial to that poor girl. The cedar grew as the years passed, and in fact this story has probably only survived because it was always there to remind people.

My grandmother told me that it finally burnt down at the beginning of the Taisho Emperor's reign.