Ryū

Also Known As: 龍, 竜; also read tatsu; “dragon”; kin to the Chinese lóng and the Buddhist nāga
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A long, wingless, serpentine water deity that commands rain, rivers, and the tides.
Role in Mythos: Ryū preside over Japan’s waters as rain-bringers, sea-kings, and guardians of both the imperial line and the Buddhist law.
Relation to Humans: People pray to ryū for rain and safe passage yet fear them for floods and drownings, and by the oldest chronicles a dragon founded the imperial dynasty itself. Break a promise to one or intrude on its true shape, and it withdraws to the deep.

Rain came late one summer, and the rice stood yellowing in the paddies, so the priests carried their offerings down to the temple pond and knelt at its rim. What they were begging for did not live in the sky. It lived in the water, coiled somewhere in the cold dark beneath the lilies, and if it chose to it could uncoil, climb the air in a rope of cloud, and open the heavens. In Japan the dragon is not a beast for a knight to run through with a lance. It is the reason the wells stay full.

A ryū looks less like a lizard than like a river that has been given a body. It is long and wingless, its scaled trunk moving through air and water alike with the same rippling ease, needing nothing so crude as a pair of wings to fly. The head is a borrowed assembly: a camel’s brow, a stag’s horns, the long drooping whiskers of an old carp, the eyes deep and bright. Each foot closes in three curved claws, and by that count alone a Japanese dragon can be told apart from its relatives, the four-clawed Korean yong and the five-clawed imperial long of China. Often it carries a jewel, a glowing tama tucked beneath the chin or gripped in a single claw, and the jewel is the heart of the thing. Wound around a pearl, the ryū is wound around the power to make water do as it pleases.

The creature was assembled over centuries, out of more than one country’s imagination. Long before any continental dragon reached the islands, Japan had its own water beings: the mizuchi that poisoned the river fords, the horned serpents that took a maiden a year, the unnamed powers worshipped at springs and rapids. Then in the Nara period, when envoys returned from Tang China with sutras and painted scrolls, they brought the long, and folded inside the Buddhist scriptures came the Indian nāga, the serpent-king who spreads his hood over the sleeping Buddha. The three traditions settled into one. The Japanese found their own river gods again in the foreign dragons and simply kept the whole tangle, which is why a single ryū can be the Shinto spirit of one particular waterfall and a guardian of the Buddhist law at the same time.

The eldest of them is written into the opening pages of the record. When the fire god Kagutsuchi was born, he scorched his mother Izanami to death, and her husband Izanagi, blind with grief, drew his long sword and cut the newborn to pieces. From the blood that ran down the blade and dripped off his fingers, more gods came into being, and among the last was Kuraokami, the dark dragon of the valleys, the rain, and the snow. The eighth-century chronicles set the name down in characters that mean, without embellishment, dark rain-dragon. A god of water, born of blood and fire. That contradiction sits at the root of the whole species.

Not every dragon is a blessing. The most famous of them is a nightmare. Yamata no Orochi had eight heads and eight tails, a body sprawled across eight valleys and eight ridges, cedar and moss growing along its back, its belly raw and weeping, its eyes the red of ripe winter cherries. Each year it devoured a daughter of one luckless family, and it had come for the last girl when Susanoo, the storm god newly thrown out of heaven, found the parents weeping. He did not meet it head on. He set out eight vats of strong rice liquor, let each head drink itself stupid, and then set to with his blade. Cutting through the tails, he struck something that chipped the edge of his sword, and drew from the flesh a blade keener than his own. That sword, Kusanagi, passed to the sun goddess and became one of the three treasures of the imperial house. A dragon had to die so that an empire could be crowned.

A gentler story runs the same bloodline through a dragon too. A young hunter named Hoori went down beneath the sea to the coral palace of the ocean god, married the god’s daughter Toyotama-hime, and in time brought her back to shore to bear their child. She asked only one thing, that he not watch her during the birth. He watched. In her labour she had gone back to her true shape, an enormous dragon coiled on the sand, and the moment she knew she had been seen she abandoned the child and fled into the sea, sealing the road between the two worlds behind her. The son she left became the father of Japan’s first emperor. The imperial line, by its own oldest telling, comes down from a dragon of the deep.

What a ryū can do follows plainly from what it is. It rules water in all its states, calling rain onto cracked fields, loosing floods as punishment, whipping up storms, holding sway over rivers and the open sea. The dragon king of the ocean, Ryūjin, keeps two jewels in his palace of fish scale and coral: one that pulls the tide out until the seabed lies bare, and one that hurls it back, so that he can strand a fleet on dry sand or drown an army as it wades. Dragons rise from deep pools into the clouds as spouts of climbing water; they shed the serpent shape for a human one to walk among people, marry them, and repay a kindness; they guard the treasure of the deep and the doctrine of the temples alike. To pray for rain in old Japan was, when it came to it, to pray to one of these.

For all that power, a dragon is not past reach. Orochi was brought down by nothing grander than drink and patience. Mizuchi, the venom-serpent of the river, was hunted and killed by one determined man. The sea-king’s own daughter, for all she commanded, could be driven off by a broken word and the shame of being watched. The ryū rules water, and water can be waited out, tricked, or simply outlasted. It answers prayers, and it answers grudges, and it does not forgive being looked at when it asked to be left alone. Cross one, and the wells it keeps brimming are the wells it can pull dry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a ryū?

A ryū is the dragon of Japanese mythology, a long, wingless, serpentine water deity that commands rain, rivers, and the sea. Ryū are worshipped as kami of springs, waterfalls, and the ocean, and they range from benevolent rain-bringers to destructive flood-serpents.

How is a Japanese ryū different from a Chinese dragon?

The clearest difference is the claws: a Japanese ryū has three toes on each foot, while the Chinese long has four or five and the Korean yong has four. The ryū also grew out of a blend of native Japanese water-serpent gods, the Chinese dragon, and the Indian nāga that reached Japan through Buddhism.

What powers does a ryū have?

A ryū controls water in every form, calling rain onto drought-stricken fields, raising floods and storms, and ruling the tides and the sea. The dragon king Ryūjin commands two jewels that make the tide ebb and flow, and many ryū can take human shape to live among people.

Is the ryū good or evil?

The ryū is both, depending on the story. Some are revered rain-bringers and guardians of the imperial line and the Buddhist law, while others, such as the eight-headed Yamata no Orochi, are monsters that demand human sacrifice until a god cuts them down.

How is the ryū connected to the Japanese emperor?

By its oldest account, the imperial line descends from a dragon: the sea god’s daughter Toyotama-hime married a mortal hunter and returned to her dragon form to give birth, and her grandson became Japan’s first emperor. The sword Kusanagi, one of the imperial regalia, was also drawn from the body of the dragon Yamata no Orochi.