"Yashiori vanquished the eight-headed serpent"

[satorukun0530]

Minor note (not sure if this was the subtitles' fault, the dub's, a background research fail on Chuck's part, a slip of the tongue in the video, or a deliberate anachronism in the film itself -- I've only seen it in Japanese without subtitles, and don't remember it so well), but the hero who slew the serpent was named Susa-no-o, and "Yashiori" appears to be the name of the sake (Yashiori-no-sake) that Susa-no-o used to get the serpent drunk. The legend itself and the name of Susa-no-o are extremely well-known in Japan, but I don't think Yashiori-no-sake is a household name (I had to look it up), which is probably why it was used as the name of the operation in the film.

Perhaps coincidentally, the story was actually depicted in the old Toho film Nippon Tanjo. (It was the only short scene in the very long film that featured a giant monster but, along with Kobayashi Masaki's Kaidan, the film was included in the Toho Tokusatsu Eiga DVD Collection about ten years ago because "tokusatsu" really just means "special effects".)