Who Is Ebisu? The Luck Deity of Fishers and Markets at Nishinomiya

At midnight before the tenth of January, every gate of Nishinomiya Shrine, in Hyogo Prefecture, is shut, and the priests keep to quiet seclusion. At six in the morning the great front gate opens. The people waiting outside run about 230 meters to the main hall, and the first three to arrive are named the year's "lucky men." It looks like a race. It is in fact the opening rite of a festival for Ebisu, a luck deity honored by fishers, merchants and farmers, whom many people know only as a laughing figure holding a fish. This page asks something plainer: what do the oldest records say about him, and what did later worshipers add?

A festival that begins in the dark

The festival is called Toka Ebisu, the Tenth Day of Ebisu. Nishinomiya Shrine holds it over three days, from the ninth to the eleventh of January. The Kokugakuin University encyclopedia calls the ninth "Ebisu Eve" and the eleventh "Remaining Ebisu." On the eve, parishioners observe a period of avoiding pollution, close their doors and windows, keep quiet, and turn the New Year pine decorations upside down. Merchants crowd the grounds from sundown to ask for a prosperous year.

Charms are sold there: bamboo sprigs hung with small rice bags, old oval coins, sea bream, ledgers and mallets. Replacing the household charm each year is said to bring luck. Other Ebisu shrines keep the festival too, among them Imamiya in Osaka, where worshippers call out that they have arrived and knock on the wall behind the shrine with their fists or small mallets. The encyclopedia adds that stories of a hard-of-hearing Ebisu are widespread.

The name the chronicles do not contain

Here is the surprise. The shrine itself states that the name Ebisu is not written in the genealogies of Japanese myth. The two court chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, never mention him.

What they do contain is the story of a first child. In the Kojiki, Izanagi and Izanami circle a pillar, and Izanami speaks first. The child born of that union is called Hiruko, "leech child." The parents set it on a reed boat and let it float away. The Nihon Shoki main text says the child could not stand even at three years old and was placed in a boat of rock-camphor wood and set adrift. Scholars still disagree about the name. The commentator Motoori Norinaga allowed two readings: a child with no arms or legs, or one whose limbs were shriveled. Some modern commentators take it as a figure for something misshapen, a failed attempt at an island.

Neither chronicle follows the child ashore. Nishinomiya's tradition fills the gap. A fisherman from Naruo, the story goes, netted a figure from the bay, put it back, and netted it again farther west. He carried it home and made offerings, and in a dream the figure said it was Hiruko, wandering from province to province, and asked to be enshrined to the west. The shrine presents this as an old local legend. It does not claim a date for it.

Reading the records: who wrote what, and when

Different documents answer different questions, so it helps to ask what kind of record each one is.

The shrine says it cannot give a founding year. It reasons that the name Ebisu appears often in documents of the middle to late Heian period, so the shrine was probably established then. That is an inference, not a dated record, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

From the shoreline to the market

Nishinomiya's own account says Ebisu was honored as a god of fishing from early times, and the Kokugakuin encyclopedia describes the same coastal worship. In fishing villages he is honored in small shrines on headlands, as the one who sends a good catch. At the start of the fishing season, boat captains or young men may dive blindfolded and bring up a stone, which is then enshrined as Ebisu. Whales, sharks and dolphins washed ashore have also been treated as Ebisu. The name is often linked to a word for outsiders at the edge of the realm, though the encyclopedia warns that neither the name's source nor the kami's character is settled.

The step from sea to market is better documented. Nishinomiya stood on a highway and held a market, and by the shrine's account Ebisu grew into a god of markets and trade. Wandering puppeteers based there carried paper images of him across western Japan. By the Muromachi period he was counted among the Seven Lucky Gods. In the Edo period the shrine says it held the exclusive right to distribute its own picture of him, granted by the fourth Tokugawa shogun. We did not find an independent record of that grant.

Farm villages gave him yet another face, as a god of the rice field. Today he has local nicknames: Ebessan in the Kansai region, Oibessan around Tokai, Oobessama in Hokuriku, Oebisusan from the Kanto region northward, according to the shrine.

What to look for at a shrine or in a picture

• A fishing rod and a fish. The encyclopedia describes the familiar image of Ebisu holding a pole or a sea bream. A hanging scroll in the Cleveland Museum of Art shows him as a priest blessing a bream with a camellia branch.
• A small shrine at a harbor or headland. These local altars are older in spirit than the big shrines and are tied to the catch.
• A partner. Ebisu is often set beside Daikokuten, and the pair came to be enshrined near the kitchen or hearth at home. Both count among the Seven Lucky Gods.
• Lucky charms in the first month. Bamboo sprigs, tiny rice bags and miniature mallets mark the Tenth Day festival.
• Three halls at Nishinomiya. The shrine enshrines Ebisu in the east hall, with Amaterasu and Okuninushi in the middle hall and Susanoo in the west hall.

Common mix-ups

"Ebisu appears in the Kojiki." He does not. The reed-boat child does, under another name, and the identification with Ebisu comes later, in shrine tradition.

"Ebisu is Hiruko in every source." No. The encyclopedia entry on Daikokuten says Ebisu was at times identified with Okuninushi and Kotoshironushi, and eventually with Kotoshironushi alone. Nishinomiya favors the Hiruko link. Sources differ, and both views are held by living shrines.

"He is a Buddhist figure, like his partner." The Seven Lucky Gods mix origins. Daikokuten traces back to an Indian deity through Buddhism, but the Kokugakuin encyclopedia treats Ebisu as a kami.

"He skips the yearly gathering of the kami at Izumo because he cannot hear." Popular books repeat this. We did not find it in the shrine or encyclopedia pages we read, so we treat it as a popular tale, not a documented belief.

"The festival is just the race." The race follows a dawn ceremony that starts at four in the morning, inside a festival of three days.

How to hold the tale and the practice together

The chronicles tell of a child on a reed boat. The shrine tells of a fisherman and a dream. The villages tell of stones from the sea bed and whales on the beach. Each is a separate layer, with its own kind of source, and none cancels the others. Today people still go to Nishinomiya in January, and they come for the living god, not for a footnote.