Shachihoko

Rain sheets off the tiles of a castle keep, and at the two ends of the highest ridge something crouches with its tail flung up at the clouds. From the ground the pair look small, an ornament, a flourish. They are over two and a half metres tall. When the weather clears and the sun comes up behind the keep, the scales on their flanks throw back a light that can be seen from the far side of the castle town, and travellers on the old road used to stop and look.

The body is a fish’s, thick through the middle and armoured in rows of overlapping scales, with fins along the back that stand up in hard spined rays. The tail is the part that gives it away as something other than a fish: it splits and curls upward and over, as if the creature were diving into the roof and had been caught halfway. The head is where accounts part company. Most describe a tiger, jaws open, brow ridged, the whiskers of a great carp coming off its muzzle. But when the Osaka physician Terajima Ryōan catalogued the thing in his illustrated encyclopedia of 1712, the Wakan Sansai Zue, he wrote that on the ridge tiles of castle towers people make a shape with a dragon’s head and a fish’s body, and this is what they call the shachihoko. Then he added, with the flatness of a man who has checked, that he did not know where the custom had come from.

No one has settled it since. Ridge ornaments arrived in Japan from China long before castles did, in the form of the shibi, a tail-shaped fitting set on the roof ridges of temples and palaces to keep fire away; the oldest surviving examples in Japan sit on Tōshōdai-ji in Nara and date to the eighth century. Terajima reached for a different ancestor, the chiwen of Chinese lore, one of the dragon’s nine sons, a swallower placed on palace ridges precisely because it gulps things down and so might gulp down a fire. Others have traced the shape further back still, to the makara, the composite sea monster that Buddhism carried east out of India. All three are plausible. None of them explains why, in Japan and almost nowhere else, the fire-eater ended up wearing a tiger’s face.

Before it was architecture it was an animal. The characters 魚虎, fish-tiger, name a real terror of the southern seas in Edo-period natural history, and Terajima gave it its own entry: six or seven feet long, thick-bodied, red-black in the water and blotched yellow and white once hauled out of it, its teeth and fin-spines as sharp as sword blades. It ate other fish. Only the shark and the swordfish could handle it, and it chewed its way out of nets so reliably that fishermen rarely bothered trying to take one.

The story attached to it is a small, nasty piece of natural theology. Whales, it was said, were bound by an old covenant to eat sardines and small fry and to leave the big fish alone, and the shachihoko were the enforcers. Dozens of them would station themselves at a whale’s mouth and strike at its cheeks and jaw, and the sound of it carried above the surface, on and on, until the whale grew confused and exhausted and its mouth fell open. Then they went in, bit through the root of its tongue, ate it, and swam out. The whale died. Coastal people called this shachi-giri, the shachi cutting, and now and then they got a whale out of it. The greatest fish in the sea, killed by a handful of small ones.

It climbed onto the roofs in the sixteenth century. Oda Nobunaga is credited with putting shachi on a castle keep for the first time at Azuchi in 1576, where the chronicle of his reign lists them among the beasts painted through the tower alongside dragons and tigers. Toyotomi Hideyoshi gilded his at Osaka, and once the most powerful man in the country had golden fish on his roof, the daimyo who served him wanted them too. When Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered his former enemies to build him a castle at Nagoya, the keep that went up in 1612 carried a matched pair in gold, a male at the north end of the ridge and a female at the south, and they became the thing the city was known for.

They were also, being made of gold, a standing temptation. The female travelled to the Vienna World Exposition in 1873 as a specimen of Japanese craft. In January 1937 a man hid inside the keep until dark, climbed scaffolding that the city had put up for a survey, and stripped fifty-eight of the northern shachi’s scales; he was arrested three weeks later in Osaka, trying to sell the metal after having it melted into ingots, and the mayor resigned over it.

What the shachihoko does is hold water. It is said to keep rain in its belly and loose it on command, which is why it goes on the ridge and why it is always set in pairs facing inward, one at each end, closing the roofline between them. Everything it can do follows from being a fish that has been put somewhere fish cannot go. It cannot leave the ridge, it has exactly one enemy, and against anything that is not fire it is a heavy ornament with a good view.

Fire is also what beat it. In May 1945 the keep at Nagoya burned in an air raid and the golden pair burned with it. The tower that stands there now went up in 1959 in reinforced concrete, and the shachi on it are copper under eighteen-karat gold, the male 2.621 metres and 1,272 kilograms, the female slightly smaller. They are replacements, and they are watched more carefully than the originals ever were.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a shachihoko?

A shachihoko is a mythical Japanese sea creature with the head of a tiger or dragon and the scaled body of a large fish, best known as the paired ornament set on the roof ridges of castles, gates and temple halls. It was believed to hold water in its body and release it, so its presence was thought to protect the building from fire. The name is often shortened to shachi.

Why are shachihoko put on castle roofs?

They were placed there to ward off fire, the great danger to timber buildings, and to display the wealth and rank of the lord below. The custom is credited to Oda Nobunaga, who put shachi on his keep at Azuchi in 1576, after which gilded pairs spread across the castles of Japan. They are always set in pairs, one at each end of the main ridge, traditionally a male and a female.

Where are the most famous shachihoko?

The golden pair on the keep of Nagoya Castle, first installed in 1612 for Tokugawa Ieyasu, are the best known. The male stands 2.621 metres and weighs 1,272 kilograms, and the female is slightly smaller; both are covered in eighteen-karat gold. The originals burned in the air raid of May 1945 and the present pair date from the 1959 reconstruction.

Does the shachihoko attack whales?

Edo-period accounts say so. The Wakan Sansai Zue of 1712 records that shachihoko gather at a whale’s mouth in numbers, batter its jaws until it opens them, then swim inside and bite out the root of its tongue, killing it. Coastal communities called the event shachi-giri and occasionally recovered the dead whale.

Is the shachihoko the same as a killer whale?

Not quite, though the words overlap. The character 鯱 is the modern Japanese word for the orca, and the Edo-period 魚虎 entry mixes real observation of a fierce sea predator with clearly imagined features such as sword-sharp spines and the ability to change into a tiger. The roof-ridge shachihoko is the mythical version, and no source describes it as a whale.

Related Entries

Shisa, Komainu, Bake-kujira, Isonade, Umibōzu, Wani, Mizuchi, Namazu, Kappa, Makara, Kirin, Dragon turtle, Qilin