Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is known today as the miraculous child who pops out of a giant peach, recruits a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant with millet dumplings, and defeats the oni of Demon Island. This episode treats his evolution across centuries as a biography, revealing that the earliest Edo-period texts from the late 1600s and early 1700s describe an elderly woman who eats the peach, regains her youth, and gives birth to him naturally, and that early illustrations depicted him as a robust 30-year-old man before an age-diminishment tendency turned him into a teenager by the late 1800s.

The conversation follows the regional variations, including a lazy sleeping boy and a hero who arrives in a box rather than a peach, and then tracks how the Meiji government placed a standardized version into national textbooks in 1887. It examines Iwaya Sa ...