Kirin

Also Known As: 麒麟; the Japanese reading of the Chinese qilin, 麒 properly the male and 麟 the female, though the pair is almost always written and treated as one animal
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A composite auspicious beast that appears only under a just government, and which Japan received from China as a finished idea and then spent a thousand years redrawing.
Role in Mythos: The first of the auspicious beasts in the Japanese ranking, used less as a character in stories than as a claim, carved and painted and stamped onto things by people who wanted it understood that their rule was the sort a kirin would visit.
Relation to Humans: It harms nothing living and will not appear at all in a corrupt age, which makes its image a convenient thing to put on your gate. Ordinary people met it in wood and bronze rather than in the flesh, on shrine beams, festival floats, family crests and eventually a beer label.

More than five hundred carvings cover the Yōmeimon at Nikkō, and the eye is meant to climb them. Sages, children, lions, peonies and dragons crowd the gate in tiers of gold leaf and vermilion lacquer, so densely that visitors used to stand until dusk picking them apart. At the top, higher than any of it, stands a kirin. The placement is the argument. Ieyasu’s shrine was built to insist that the peace he left behind was the natural order reasserting itself, and the beast set above everything else is the one that will not show its face for a ruler who has not earned it.

The animal is a committee. A dragon’s head, antlered, on the body of a deer; hooves split like an ox’s; a mane that lifts rather than falls; a row of scales down the flank that takes the light in a way no grazing animal’s coat should. Japanese carvers pulled the silhouette further toward the deer than Chinese ones ever did, setting the antlers back on the skull and softening the profile, until the creature on a shrine beam in Tochigi and the creature on a Ming scroll are recognisably cousins rather than twins. The tail switches like an ox’s. In China it more often flicks like a lion’s whisk. These are small differences and they took centuries to accumulate.

Japan did not invent the kirin. It imported the entire machinery the kirin belonged to. When Kōtoku’s court issued the edict recorded in the Nihon Shoki, it set out the theory in the borrowed Chinese terms: when a sage rules, Heaven answers by showing auspicious signs, and the edict lists them, phoenix and kirin and white pheasant and white crow. What actually arrived at court that year was a white pheasant, handed up by a provincial governor, and the era was renamed Hakuchi in its honour. The kirin stayed where it was, in the list, a category of good news rather than an animal anyone expected through the door. That is roughly where it remained: enormously important and almost never present.

Which made it useful. A beast that appears only in a well-governed age is a beast worth claiming, and the most striking thing anyone in Japan did with the kirin was done by a man with no obvious claim to it at all. Oda Nobunaga, in the middle of a campaign to conquer the country, took to signing his letters with a monogram nobody could read for four centuries. The medieval historian Satō Shin’ichi eventually cracked it by setting it beside a later signature of Katsu Kaishū’s and recognising the character underneath: 麟, the second half of the kirin’s name. Nobunaga used it from around the time he took Mino, alongside the seal reading Tenka Fubu, and reserved it for the letters that mattered, the ones going to other daimyo and to the court. A warlord signed his correspondence with the peace-beast. Whether that is ambition, propaganda or a genuine idea of what he was for depends on which historian you ask, and the sources do not settle it.

The kirin’s real Japanese life was in material. It went into shrine and temple carving, into Shōsōin treasures, onto the towering hoko floats of the Gion Matsuri, into family crests and lacquer and sword fittings, and by the Edo period it was standard vocabulary for anyone decorating a building that wanted to imply virtue. At Dazaifu Tenmangū a bronze kirin stands near the purification basin, put there by Hakata merchants in the last years of the shogunate. Wood, gilt, bronze, cold to the hand on a winter morning.

Then Meiji did something to it that no Chinese source would have permitted. When the new Nihonbashi was finished in 1911, a stone double arch replacing the old wooden bridge at the zero point from which every road in the country was measured, the decorative programme called for kirin at the central pillars. Watanabe Osao modelled them and his father-in-law Okazaki Sessei cast them, and the finished bronzes have wings. Kirin do not have wings. They were given them anyway, because the bridge was the point from which the roads of Japan set out, and a city in a hurry wanted an animal that looked like it was about to leave. Chuo Ward now lists the fins as a registered cultural property, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives uses the beast as its logo. It is the only winged kirin that matters, and it exists because a Meiji committee wanted a metaphor.

The last transformation was linguistic. Casting about for a Japanese word for the giraffe, the naturalist Tanaka Yoshio reached for the kirin, and his 1874 translation of a mammal handbook printed the giraffe as 麒麟. It stuck. Japanese and Korean still call the animal by the sacred beast’s name; Chinese went with a plainer compound meaning long-necked deer. Fourteen years later, when the Japan Brewery Company needed a mark for a new lager and noticed that imported European beers all had animals on their labels, Shōda Heigorō of Mitsubishi proposed the kirin. The company that inherited the trademark in 1907 is still called after it. A creature that once certified the legitimacy of emperors now certifies a beer, and does so in enormous volume.

Its powers are almost entirely powers of refusal. It will not tread on a living blade of grass, will not eat anything that has been alive, will not be trapped, and above all will not appear. That last is the whole of its strength, because a sign that can be produced on demand certifies nothing, and the kirin’s value to every shogun and merchant and brewer who ever used it rests on its reputation for staying away. Where it does turn up, it is said to bring fortune to a house and to mark out a child of unusual promise.

The limits follow from the same logic. A creature defined by absence cannot be summoned, only deserved, and no amount of carving one over your gate obliges the real thing to arrive. It has no violence available to it, so it cannot defend the order it announces. And because it will not enter a corrupt age, it is useless exactly when it would be most wanted. To harm one, or to come across a dead one, is read as a verdict on the world that permitted it rather than as a piece of bad luck.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kirin in Japanese mythology?

The kirin is an auspicious composite beast, first among the sacred animals in the Japanese ranking, whose appearance signals that a ruler is just and an age is peaceful. It is more often a symbol than a character: Japan used its image on shrines, festival floats, crests and seals rather than telling stories about it. It harms no living thing and will not appear during a corrupt reign.

Is the kirin the same as the Chinese qilin?

Yes. Kirin is the Japanese reading of the same two characters, 麒麟, that are read qilin in Chinese, and the creature came to Japan from China along with the whole Chinese apparatus of auspicious omens. Japan then developed it in its own directions, making the silhouette more deer-like and ranking it first among auspicious beasts where China places it after the dragon.

Why does the kirin on Nihonbashi have wings?

Because the designers gave it a pair it was never supposed to have. The bronze kirin at the centre of the 1911 Nihonbashi were modelled by Watanabe Osao and cast by Okazaki Sessei, and the wings were added to express the idea of taking flight from Nihonbashi, the point from which all distances in Japan were measured. Chuo Ward lists them as a registered cultural property.

Why is Kirin beer named after the kirin?

Shōda Heigorō of Mitsubishi proposed the sacred beast as the trademark when the Japan Brewery Company launched its lager in 1888, reportedly because imported European beers of the period carried animals on their labels and an auspicious Eastern creature made a fitting counterpart. The trademark passed to Kirin Brewery in 1907, and the company still carries the name.

Why is the Japanese word for giraffe also kirin?

The naturalist Tanaka Yoshio proposed the sacred beast’s name for the newly encountered animal, and it appeared as 麒麟 in his 1874 translation of a handbook of mammals. The usage stuck in Japanese and in Korean. Chinese did not adopt it and uses a compound meaning long-necked deer instead.