Tengu Name Generator

Tengu are the winged, red-faced or crow-headed spirits who haunt Japan's sacred mountains, and their names follow rules borrowed from the mountain ascetics (yamabushi) they were said to imitate. The great tengu of legend almost always carry the suffix -bō (坊), a title once given to monks and priestly boys: Sōjōbō of Mount Kurama, who trained the young hero Yoshitsune; Tarōbō of Mount Atago; Jirōbō of Mount Hira; Buzenbō of Hikosan; and Sanjakubō of Iizuna. Medieval texts list forty-eight such daitengu, each named for the peak he rules, so "Kurama-yama Sōjōbō" reads as both a name and an address.

Lesser tengu, the karasu tengu with beaks and black feathers, are rarely named in old sources, which leaves room for invention. The list above builds those names from Japanese words for crow (karasu), hawk (taka), wind (kaze), thunder (rai), shadow (kage), and wing (hane), often finished with the boyish -maru or the monkish -bō so they sit comfortably beside the legendary names.

Use the numbered brother names (Tarōbō, Jirōbō, Saburōbō, Shirōbō) for a hierarchy of tengu on one mountain, the mountain-plus-title forms for a lordly daitengu, and short compounds like Kurotaka or Hayabusa for young, quick, mischievous crow tengu.