Namazu

Beneath the wet dark under the islands of Japan lies a fish the size of the country. Its tail is said to rest under one province while its head lies pinned beneath another, its whiskered mouth working slowly in the mud. For most of history it does nothing. A single stone holds it in place, driven down through its skull by a god with sharper duties than sitting on a catfish. When that god looks away, the great body rolls. The ground splits, wells turn foul, beams and roof-tiles come down in the night. Then the god sets his weight against the stone again, and the country goes still.

It is only a catfish, in the way that a mountain is only a rock. The same flat head, the same small eyes set far apart, the same drooping barbels that a river namazu trails through the shallows, swollen to a scale that has no business existing. Its skin is dark and slick and colorless in the underworld where it lives, its bulk soft rather than armored, a slab of muscle lying in the silt below the bedrock. It has no need of teeth or claws. Its weapon is its own size, and the only thing it ever really does is turn over.

The god who keeps it down is Takemikazuchi, the sword-and-thunder deity enshrined at Kashima in what is now Ibaraki. His instrument is the kaname-ishi, the pivot stone, a rounded gray head of rock that still shows above the ground in the shrine precinct with almost all of its body buried out of sight. The stone is said to run down without end, its point set on the catfish’s head far below, so that as long as it holds the fish cannot buck. They tell of one lord who set men digging around it for seven days and nights and never found where it stopped. What is visible is a stone you could sit on. What is claimed for it is a nail through the spine of the world.

The catfish is a latecomer to this work. For a long time the thing that shook the earth in Japan was a dragon, or sometimes a great serpent coiled beneath the land, and the swap to a fish happened slowly, somewhere around Lake Biwa, from perhaps the sixteenth century onward. The oldest firm trace of it is bluntly practical. In 1596, after an earthquake wrecked his half-built Fushimi Castle, Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent word that the rebuilding be made to hold against the namazu. By the late seventeenth century the belief had spread and hardened, and by the nineteenth it was everywhere. This is not an ancient myth wearing modern dress. It grew up in the cities of the Edo period, and it can be watched arriving.

Its great performance came on a night in the tenth lunar month of 1855. The timing mattered, because the tenth month is the one the old calendar calls the month without gods, when the deities of the land leave their shrines and gather far away at Izumo. Kashima was gone with the rest. The story says he had left Ebisu, the cheerful god of fishermen and markets, to mind the stone in his absence, and that Ebisu dozed. A little before ten at night the catfish, unwatched, threw itself over. Edo, then among the largest cities on earth, heaved and cracked and began to burn. Thousands died in the dark and the fires that followed. When Kashima came hurrying back too late, the prints would show him arriving with his sword out and his face set, throwing the fish down and driving the stone home while the survivors looked on.

What happened next has few parallels in the history of any disaster. Within days the print shops of the ruined city flooded the streets with pictures of the catfish, hundreds of different designs in a matter of weeks. Most carried no artist’s name, because they were unlicensed, and by the end of the year the authorities had banned them outright. In some the fish cowers under a mob of the bereaved who beat it with hammers and fists. In others Kashima pins it as he should have from the start. But the strangest show the catfish as a friend. Because the earthquake had flattened the storehouses of the rich and thrown a fortune in wages to the carpenters, plasterers, and tilers who would rebuild, the fish became a yonaoshi daimyojin, a god of setting the world right, shaking hoarded gold out of merchants and letting it fall to men who worked with their hands. The same fish that killed thousands was thanked for the work. People pinned its image to their walls, half as a curse and half as a charm, hoping a picture of the caught catfish would help keep the real one still.

Its power needs no elaboration. It does not breathe fire or cast spells or hunt anyone. It simply moves, and the moving is an earthquake, the whole surface of a country lifted and dropped by one animal turning in its sleep. Fishermen and farmers watched real catfish for it, swearing the small fish grew restless and thrashed in their ponds in the hours before the ground shook, reading the pond namazu as an alarm bell for the great one. And yet for all that weight the creature is a prisoner. It cannot free itself, cannot choose its moment, cannot do anything at all while the stone is seated and the god is paying attention. Its single act depends entirely on someone else’s failure to watch. It is beaten in the pictures, mocked as a fat sluggard, and pinned again at the end of every telling. The most powerful animal in the folklore of Japan spends nearly all of its existence lying still with a nail through its head, waiting for a god to blink.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Namazu?

Namazu, sometimes called Ōnamazu (“great catfish”), is a giant catfish in Japanese folklore that lives in the mud beneath the islands of Japan and causes earthquakes when it thrashes its body. It is usually pictured held in place by the god Takemikazuchi of Kashima, who pins its head with a sacred stone. The belief became widespread during the Edo period.

Why does Namazu cause earthquakes?

Earthquakes happen when Namazu, normally held still beneath the earth, is left unguarded and rolls or thrashes its huge body. In the tale of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake, the god Kashima had gone to the annual gathering of deities at Izumo and left Ebisu to watch the catfish, but Ebisu fell asleep and the fish broke loose. When Kashima presses his stone back down onto its head, the shaking stops.

What is the kaname-ishi stone?

The kaname-ishi, or “pivot stone,” is the sacred rock that the god Takemikazuchi uses to pin Namazu’s head and keep it from moving. Only a rounded tip of it shows above ground at Kashima Shrine in Ibaraki Prefecture, and tradition holds that it runs impossibly deep, down to the catfish itself. It remains an object of worship today.

What are namazu-e?

Namazu-e (“catfish pictures”) are woodblock prints of the giant catfish that appeared by the hundreds in the weeks after the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake. Most were published anonymously because they were unlicensed, and the government banned them within the year. They showed the catfish being punished by survivors, being subdued by the god Kashima, or acting as a “world-rectifying” deity that redistributed wealth from the rich to laborers.

Is Namazu good or evil?

Namazu is ambivalent rather than simply evil. It is blamed for the death and destruction of earthquakes, yet after 1855 it was also celebrated as a yonaoshi daimyojin, a god of “world rectification” that shook hoarded money out of the wealthy and into the hands of the workers who rebuilt the city. People displayed its image both to curse it and to protect their homes.

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