Ebisu

At the start of the fishing season, in some villages on the Japanese coast, a young man was blindfolded and sent over the side of a boat. He went down into cold water with his eyes covered, felt about on the bottom, and came up holding whatever stone his hands had closed on. The stone was carried ashore, set in a small shrine on the headland, and worshipped for the rest of the year. Its name was Ebisu.

That is the oldest face of the god, and it has very little to do with the jolly figure on the shop shelf. In the fishing communities where his worship seems to have begun, Ebisu was less a person than a thing that arrives. A whale stranded on the beach was Ebisu. So was a shark, or a dolphin, or a log rolled in by a storm. So, in some places, was a human corpse found floating offshore, which the crew were bound to bring home and bury with care, because a body treated well would send fish. The idea underneath all of it is simple. Luck does not grow at home. It lives somewhere out past the horizon, and now and then the sea delivers it.

His name fits. It is thought to be the same word as emishi or ebisu, the old Yamato terms for foreign peoples living at the edges of their world. Nobody has settled the question, but the sense of an outsider clings to him. He is the stranger who washes up, and whose coming is good news.

The old chronicles of Japan never mention a god called Ebisu. What they do contain is two figures who were later made to carry his name. The first is Hiruko, the leech child. When Izanagi and Izanami circled the heavenly pillar to be wed, the woman spoke first, which was the wrong order, and their firstborn came out wrong as well. The Kojiki says only that they put the child in a boat of reeds and let it float away. The Nihon Shoki adds that even at three years old he could not stand, and that the boat was of camphor wood, left to the wind. Neither book says what became of him. The story simply drops him into the current.

Later ages picked him up. By the medieval period people at Nishinomiya, on the shore of what is now Hyogo Prefecture, were saying that the abandoned child had come to land there, been taken in by fisherfolk, and grown into the god of their shrine, known locally as Ebisu Saburo. A soft, boneless infant sent off in a boat had become the bringer of everything the sea gives. As a piece of folk repair it is hard to beat.

The second figure is Kotoshironushi, a son of Okuninushi, the great lord of Izumo. When the heavenly gods sent Takemikazuchi down to demand the land, Okuninushi said the answer lay with his son, who was away at Cape Miho, fishing. Fetched back, the son agreed the land should be given up. Then he tipped his boat over with his foot, clapped his hands in a strange reversed fashion, turned the boat into a fence of green branches and hid himself inside it. A god last seen with a fishing line was an easy match for a fisherman’s god, and Miho Shrine in Shimane still honours Ebisu under that name. The two origin stories have never been reconciled. Shrines simply choose one.

On an ordinary morning the Ebisu most people know sits on a kitchen shelf or behind a shop counter. He is a stout man with a broad laughing face, heavy earlobes and a tall cap folded to one side, dressed in the hunting robe of an old courtier. His right hand grips a bamboo rod. Under his left arm, held tight against his ribs, is a fat red sea bream, a fish whose name in Japanese chimes with the word for celebration. Beside him, more often than not, stands Daikoku with his mallet and rice bales. The pair were once found in almost every house in the country.

He got from the beach to the counting house by way of the market. In 1163 he was installed as guardian of the market at Todaiji in Nara, and in 1253 at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu in Kamakura. Travelling puppeteers based at Nishinomiya carried his image from town to town, making a little wooden Ebisu dance and catch his fish on doorsteps. Merchants took to him. Farmers did too, and inland he blends into the god of the rice field, who is offered the first seedlings of the year, and in some hill villages into the god of the mountain.

His powers follow from where he comes from. He sends the catch, fills the till and fattens the crop, and he asks little in return beyond a fish on his altar and some noise. The noise matters. Ebisu is hard of hearing. At his shrine in Kyoto, worshippers finish their prayers and then walk round to the side of the hall and rap on a wooden board, to be sure he has noticed. He is also said to be a little lame, which suits a child who could not stand at three.

The deafness has one more consequence. In the tenth month of the old calendar every god in Japan is called away to a great assembly at Izumo, and the rest of the country is left without them. Ebisu does not hear the summons. He stays home, minding the houses and shops, and on the twentieth of that month the merchants hold his feast and set a sea bream before him.

His great day now is the tenth of January. Before six in the morning at Nishinomiya a drum sounds, the gates swing open, and thousands of runners sprint some two hundred and thirty metres across the cold gravel to the main hall. The first three in are the lucky men of the year. He is a god of luck, after all, and luck has never been fair.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ebisu in Japanese mythology?

Ebisu is the Japanese god of fishermen, merchants and good fortune. He is one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune and the only one of the seven who is native to Japan. He is usually shown as a plump, laughing man holding a fishing rod and a red sea bream.

Is Ebisu the same as Hiruko?

Later tradition says yes, but the oldest texts do not. Hiruko is the first child of Izanagi and Izanami, set adrift in a boat because he was born malformed, and the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki never say what happened to him. By the medieval period, people at Nishinomiya said the child had drifted ashore there and become Ebisu. Other shrines, such as Miho Shrine, identify Ebisu with Kotoshironushi instead.

Why is Ebisu shown with a fish and a fishing rod?

Ebisu holds a rod and a sea bream because his worship is thought to have begun among fishermen, who prayed to him for a good catch. The sea bream is also a fish of celebration in Japan. Kotoshironushi, one of the gods identified with Ebisu, was out fishing at Cape Miho when the heavenly gods came to claim the land.

Why does Ebisu stay behind when the other gods go to Izumo?

Ebisu is said to be hard of hearing, so he does not hear the call that gathers all the other gods at Izumo in the tenth month of the old calendar. He stays behind to watch over homes and shops. Merchants hold his feast on the twentieth day of that month and offer him a sea bream.

Why were whales and things washed ashore called Ebisu?

In Japanese fishing villages, Ebisu was understood as good fortune arriving from the sea. Stranded whales, sharks, dolphins, stones from the seabed and even floating corpses were called Ebisu and treated as the god himself. Fishermen believed that honouring these arrivals would bring plentiful fish.

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Izanagi and Izanami, Ookuninushi, Benzaiten, Amaterasu, Susanoo, Inari, Ryūjin, Bake-kujira, Funayūrei, Umibōzu, Namazu