Shisa

Nothing on the hill at Tomori faces the village. The stone lion set there crouches with its back to the houses and its blunt face turned toward a low green mountain called Yaese-dake, and it has been staring at that mountain since 1689. It is a heavy animal, a little under a metre and a half tall and about a metre and three quarters from muzzle to tail, cut from the island’s porous grey limestone. Rain has softened its edges. Lichen has taken the hollows. Across its flank and haunch are shallow round pits that look like weathering and are not.

The reason it faces the mountain was written down. The Kyūyō, official chronicle of the Ryukyu Kingdom, compiled in classical Chinese between 1743 and 1745 and added to for another century afterward, records under the twenty-first year of King Shō Tei a single flat sentence: a lion form was erected for the first time facing Yaese-dake, in order to prevent fire. Behind that sentence is a village that kept burning. Tomori called in a geomancer from Kumemura, the Chinese-descended scholar community outside Naha that supplied the kingdom with its feng shui expertise, and he read the landscape and told them the fault was the mountain. Yaese-dake had the nature of fire, hī-zan, and the cure was to carve a lion and aim it. Okinawan local histories give his name as Sai Ōtan, known in Ryukyuan style as Ōta Peechin. The villagers cut the lion. The fires stopped.

The word had travelled further than the stone. Shisa is the Okinawan pronunciation of shishi, the lion, which reached the islands through the Chinese guardian lion and reached China from the Sanskrit siṃha; in the Yaeyama Islands people still say it closer to the older form, shīshī. No lion has ever lived on Okinawa. Nobody who carved one had seen the animal. What landed at Naha was an image that had come down a trade route from the ancient Near East through the Buddhist world into the courts of southern China, redrawn a dozen times along the way by people working from other people’s carvings, and the Ryukyuan version is one more redrawing.

For most of its history on the islands the lion belonged to the state. The oldest lion carving in Okinawa sits on the stone reliquary of King Eiso at Urasoe Yōdore, dated either to the late thirteenth century, when Eiso died, or to the fifteenth if the carving technique is the better guide. After it come the palace lions: the pair at Sueyoshi shrine from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the lions of the Tamaudun royal mausoleum carved around 1501 when the tomb was built, a later pair at Urasoe Yōdore, and stone lions flanking the Kankaimon and Zuisenmon gates of Shuri Castle. Those animals warded off evil and also announced who lived behind them. Several did not survive 1945. A stone lion at the Uchaya Udun, the royal villa above Shuri, faces the same fire mountain that Tomori’s does and was known to the scholar Tei Junsoku, who wrote a poem about it, which is what places it in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

After 1689 the lion left the walls and went to the villages, and it stayed. Village lions spread through the southern half of the main island, and a survey published in 2021 counted 153 still standing. They are not decoration. A lion set up on its own is usually a hī-gēshi, a fire-turner, aimed like Tomori’s at whatever high ground the geomancer blamed. Where two or more guard the approaches to a settlement they are yanamun-gēshi, turning back bad things in general, and at least some went up because the next village along had one and the rivalry demanded an answer. A few of them were never carved at all. They are natural boulders that somebody decided were lions, and they are treated exactly the same way.

There is no correct way for a shisa to look. Line up a dozen village lions and the only constant is the crouch. Some have drilled eyes and a mouth crowded with teeth, some are worn down to the suggestion of a face, some are frankly comic, and the differences are not degradation but the record of many hands working with no pattern book between them.

The thing most people picture, the fat glazed pair grinning off a red tile roof, is barely older than photography. Ryukyuan sumptuary law dictated how large a commoner’s house could be and forbade tiled roofs outright. The restriction came off in 1889, red tile spread through the villages, and the men who laid it found themselves at the end of every job with a heap of leftover plaster and broken tile. They knelt on the ridge in the heat with the lime paste stiffening under their thumbs and built a lion out of the offcuts, one to a house, no two the same, the tail packed on last and the jaw opened with the point of a tool. A craftsman’s improvisation became a tradition inside a generation.

Pairing came with Buddhism, or at least with the a-un convention that gives paired guardians the first and last sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet, one mouth open and one shut. The open mouth is generally said to call good fortune in, the closed one to hold it there and shut misfortune out. Sexes are assigned to the mouths as well, and here the tradition contradicts itself outright: some accounts make the open-mouthed lion male and stand it on the right, others reverse both the sex and the side. Nobody agrees which one is the female.

One story attaches to the shisa itself rather than to any particular stone, and it is worth being plain about where it comes from. English-language readers have it from Sesoko Chizue’s Legends of Okinawa, published on the island in 1969, and it is difficult to trace behind her. A Chinese envoy at the court of Shuri gave the king a necklace with a small shisa figure on it, and the king took to wearing it under his clothes. At Madanbashi, by the bay at Naha, a sea dragon had been coming ashore to eat villagers and smash their property. The king happened to be visiting when it came. A noro, one of the kingdom’s priestesses, had been told in a dream what to do, and sent a boy named Chiga running with the message: go down to the beach and hold the figure up. He did. A roar went through the village so deep that it shook the dragon, a boulder dropped out of the sky and pinned its tail, and the creature died where it lay. Body and boulder greened over into the Gana-mui grove, which stands near the Naha Ōhashi bridge to this day.

The Tomori lion is not a monument. It is worked. On the first day of the tenth lunar month Okinawan communities keep kamamāi, the round of the hearths, a fire-prevention observance in which a noro prays at the village’s sacred places that no fire come, and at Tomori the officials climb to the great lion and pray in front of it. The village histories record what that used to involve. The men went round with bundles of bamboo roughly six feet long, calling out as they walked, and any housewife whose kitchen was found badly kept got the bundle across her backside. On the ninth day of the ninth month the young men gathered at Serijō, the old fortification the lion sits above, and danced there with staves.

Whatever power a shisa has is directional. It does not hunt, does not speak, has no parentage, no myth cycle and no adventures, and outside that one Naha story it does nothing that can be narrated. It works by facing, and its strength is a function of where a specialist decided the danger lay. That is also its weakness. A lion aimed at the wrong hill guards nothing, and a lion is only stone or fired clay or lime plaster, breakable, saleable, portable, liable to be tidied away by a road widening or knocked off a ridge by a typhoon.

In June 1945 the Japanese army dug in around Yaese-dake and the ground in front of Tomori became a front line. American soldiers sheltered behind the lion while they watched the mountain, taking cover behind a block of limestone that had been set there to stop fires, and a photograph of it survives. The pits in its flank are bullet strikes. They are shallower now than they were, worn down across eighty years of rain, and the animal is still facing the mountain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a shisa?

A shisa is a Ryukyuan guardian lion, a protective figure of stone, ceramic or lime plaster placed on roofs, gateposts, garden walls and village boundaries in Okinawa to turn away fire and evil. It descends from the Chinese guardian lion and its name is the Okinawan pronunciation of shishi, meaning lion. Shisa are objects of practice rather than characters in stories, and they are usually aimed at a specific danger.

What is the oldest shisa in Okinawa?

The oldest village shisa is the great stone lion of Tomori in Yaese, set up in 1689 and now a designated prefectural cultural property. It stands about 142 centimetres tall and 176 centimetres long, and the Ryukyu Kingdom’s official chronicle, the Kyūyō, records that it was erected facing Mount Yaese to prevent fire. Older lion carvings exist in Okinawa, but they belonged to royal tombs, shrines and castle gates rather than to a village.

Why does one shisa have its mouth open and the other closed?

Paired shisa follow the a-un convention shared with Japanese komainu, in which two guardians voice the first and last sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet. The open-mouthed lion is generally said to invite good fortune in, while the closed-mouthed lion holds it there and keeps misfortune out. Which one is male and which female is genuinely disputed, and Okinawan sources reverse the assignment.

Why are shisa put on rooftops?

Roof shisa are a late development, not an ancient one. The Ryukyu Kingdom forbade commoners tiled roofs, and only after that restriction was lifted in 1889 did red tile spread through ordinary villages. The tilers who laid the roofs began modelling lions from leftover lime plaster and broken tile and setting them on the ridge, which is why old roof shisa are all slightly different.

What is the difference between a shisa and a komainu?

Both descend from the Chinese guardian lion and both usually appear as a pair with one mouth open and one shut, but komainu belong to shrines and temples in mainland Japan while shisa belong to Ryukyuan settlements and private houses. Shisa are far more often set against a named, located threat, such as a mountain blamed for fires, and unlike komainu they became a fixture of domestic architecture.

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