Botan: Mountain Whale Flood Gate

A Spell Card of Miyoi Okunoda from the world delirious with eternal summer (a Touhou LW original). Mountain whales, or ''yama-kujira'' in Japanese, is another name for wild boar. This name came about because of the historic bans on the consumption of four-legged animals and chickens in Japan. The people of the past found inventive ways to circumvent these rules, like pretending rabbit meat was bird meat, which led to rabbits being counted with the same word as birds in modern-day Japanese. Calling boar mountain whales follows the same logic since whales were thought to be fish in the past, and everyone was allowed to eat fish. This may seem dishonest, but meat is just that delicious. The protein is also good for you.

Incidentally, wild boar hot pot is called botan nabe, but this is for an entirely different reason. It is named as such because the way the boar meat is arranged in the pot resembles a ''botan,'' the Japanese word for ''peony.''