Binbōgami

On the last day of the month in Senba, the merchant quarter of Osaka, somebody would put miso on the fire. The smell carried down a street of shuttered warehouses, dark and salty and faintly scorched, and the head clerk walked the round of the houses holding the grilled miso flat like a plate until he judged the moment right. Then he folded it in half. Inside, so the belief went, was the poverty god, drawn out of the rafters by the one smell he cannot leave alone. The clerk carried him down to the river and let him go, and then scrubbed the miso smell off his own hands before he went home, in case it followed him back. Households in Senba were still doing this around 1877.

He is easy to picture and not pleasant to look at. A thin old man, sallow, badly dressed, sad about the face, with a fan in his hand. The fan is not for the heat. It is a shibu-uchiwa, paper stiffened with persimmon tannin until it is tough enough to fan a cooking fire, and he uses it to waft the smell of grilling miso towards himself. Miso is his weakness in both directions at once. He is said to prefer idle people, and when he moves into a house he takes the closet.

The idea is older than the word. Around 1280 the monk Mujū Ichien put together the Shasekishū, a rambling collection of Buddhist tales, and one of them is called Driving Out Poverty. The thing driven out is not yet a binbōgami; it is Hinkyū-den, Lord Poverty. A fifty-year-old monk of Owari province named Enjōbō gathered his disciples on the last night of the month, took up peach branches, and went through the house beating and chanting at it to come out now, and drove it as far as the gate, and shut the gate behind it. Peach had been turning back the unwelcome since the Kojiki, where Izanagi flings peaches at his pursuers on the road up from the land of the dead. Editions of the Shasekishū file the story in different books, which is a small confusion of the sort that tends to follow him. Kamo no Chōmei’s Hosshinshū, a little earlier, has a monk of Mii-dera meet the same figure in a dream.

The word binbōgami itself surfaces in the Muromachi period, and the first place it looks fully at home is a piece of gossip. Kyoto in the sixth month of 1481 was still a ruin from the Ōnin War, and the city passed around a rumour that the wives of the fortune gods of Sakai had come up to the capital while the husbands, the poverty gods of Kyoto, had gone down to Sakai. It is a joke and a prayer in the same breath, a wrecked town talking itself into recovery, and it shows that the poverty gods were imagined as men with wives and households of their own. By about 1540 the word was ordinary enough for the poet Arakida Moritake to drop into linked verse without explaining it.

Edo kept him and gave him a biography. In Tsumura Sōan’s essay collection Tankai, written around 1795, a man dozing at home dreams of a ragged old man walking into his room, and from then on nothing he touches comes right. Four years later the old man returns to his sleep to announce that he is leaving, and gives instructions for a proper send-off: a little baked rice and baked miso set on an oshiki, a square wooden tray, carried out through the back door and released into a river. Then a warning. Never grill miso in this house again, and never eat it raw either, because raw miso says you could not spare the fire to cook it, and that is an invitation.

The tale collection Tōen Shōsetsu, put together by Kyokutei Bakin and his circle in 1825, tells it colder. In 1821 a samurai household in the Banchō district of Edo could not stop falling ill. A servant of that house, walking out to Sōka, fell in with a priest who remarked that he had just come from the servant’s master’s house. The servant had never seen him there. The sickness was all his own doing, the priest said, because he was the binbōgami; but the household had reached the bottom of its poverty, so he was moving on, and the master’s fortunes would rise from now. Then he was not there. The house did recover.

That is the shape of him. He does not strike, he moves in.

Which is exactly why the stories keep turning. Ihara Saikaku’s Nippon Eitaigura of 1688 has a man who honoured the poverty god rather than cursing him, and was visited on the night of the seven herbs, the seventh of the first month, by the god himself, so moved at being served on a proper tray that he made the man rich. In another of Saikaku’s pieces a permanently hard-up retainer in Koishikawa works out on New Year’s Eve that nothing truly catastrophic has ever befallen him, only steady, level poverty, and concludes that the binbōgami must have been shielding him. He sets out sake and rice and asks, politely, for a little relief. Things improve slightly.

The Koishikawa story has an address. At Ōta Shrine, in the grounds of the Ushi-Tenjin Kitano Shrine in Bunkyō, Tokyo, the deity’s own record tells of a poor and honest bannerman living near Sanbyaku-zaka whose dream was visited by an old woman. She was the poverty god of the house, she said; she had been comfortable there a long while and wished to repay him. Offer red rice and fried tofu on the first, the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth of every month, worship her, and fortune would follow. It did. The shrine also records that the deity it first held was Kokuanten, the goddess of black darkness, whom it calls the elder sister of Benzaiten, and that is its own quiet piece of history: the older Buddhist pairing set darkness against Kichijōten, goddess of fortune, whose attributes were largely absorbed by Benzaiten from the fifteenth century onward until the two were routinely confused. So in Bunkyō the poverty god is a woman, and older than good luck.

What actually shifts him is heat, order and work. In Niigata a fire lit in the sunken hearth on New Year’s Eve was said to make him too uncomfortable to stay, while the same warmth drew the fortune god in behind him. In Tsushima in Ehime, poking and digging at the hearth fire too much was said to raise one. The folktale index has him at type 59A, filed under the question of what he hates, and the classic version is this: a family at the end of its resources decides to slip away by night, and finds the poverty god packing to come along. They stay. They work. He goes.

Then the tellings collected across the twentieth century start refusing the moral outright. A Fukushima version has him trying to leave a hardworking couple who will not let him go, and after enough hospitality he turns into a god of fortune and the family prospers. In a version from Sakekawa in Yamagata, given by the teller Tsuchida Masae, the god of wealth arrives to throw him out and the couple take his side; the wealth god drops his lucky mallet in the scuffle, the poverty god picks it up, and the house does well after all. In a Niigata telling the two gods argue it out, the couple back the poverty god, the fortune god leaves in disgust, the family grows steadily poorer, and the pair of them live in perfect contentment to the end of their lives. An Okinawan variant has the gods settle it by strength, the couple help the poverty god win, and everyone stays poor.

He is still being sent off, in a manner of speaking. A stone poverty god stands at Myōsen-ji in Taitō with a monkey on his head, because saru is a monkey and also means to leave, and the figure is modelled on the character from Hudson’s Momotarō train games. There are others on railway platforms in Kagawa, Nagasaki and Chiba, one wearing a pheasant and one a dog, punning in the same direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a binbōgami?

A binbōgami is a Japanese kami of poverty that attaches itself to a person or a house and drains its fortune. It is usually described as a gaunt, shabby old man carrying a stiff paper fan, and it is said to favour lazy households and to settle in the closet. Its effects are slow rather than violent: illness, waste and hardship that will not lift.

How do you get rid of a binbōgami?

Tradition favours sending it off politely rather than driving it out. The essay collection Tankai prescribes baked rice and baked miso on a square wooden tray, carried out the back door and floated down a river, while merchants in Senba in Osaka lured it out with the smell of grilled miso and folded it inside the miso before consigning it to the water. Lighting the hearth on New Year’s Eve was said to make a house too hot for it, and hard work and cleanliness were held to drive it away on their own.

Why does the binbōgami carry a fan?

The binbōgami is said to love miso, especially grilled miso, and uses the fan to waft the smell towards himself. The fan is a shibu-uchiwa, paper coated with persimmon tannin to make it tough enough for fanning a fire, and a proverb holds that this kind of fan attracts the poverty god.

Can a binbōgami bring good luck?

Yes, and a surprising number of stories say so. Ihara Saikaku’s Nippon Eitaigura of 1688 has a man who treated the poverty god with courtesy and was made rich by it, and Ōta Shrine in Tokyo grew up around a dream in which the poverty god of a poor household offered to repay her host in exchange for regular offerings. Several folktales go further, with a family taking the poverty god’s side against the god of wealth and choosing to remain poor.

How old is the binbōgami?

The personification of poverty appears in Japanese writing by the thirteenth century, in Mujū Ichien’s Shasekishū of around 1280, where it is called Hinkyū-den rather than binbōgami. The word binbōgami itself is recorded from the Muromachi period, including a Kyoto rumour of 1481, and the figure became widely familiar in the Edo period through essays, tales and comic storytelling.

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