Ebisu and the Fish He Would Not Catch

He sits on a rock and laughs.

This is the essential image of Ebisu: a fat man on a flat rock at the edge of the sea, a fishing rod in one hand, a red sea bream under his arm, his round face split into the widest grin in the divine pantheon. He is wearing a tall court hat, which is formal dress for a man with his feet wet. The sea bream he carries is already caught, which makes the fishing rod he holds optional in a way he appears to find hilarious.

He is the god of fishermen and commerce and honest work, and he is the most cheerful deity in the Japanese religious tradition.

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His origin is disputed and the dispute is itself instructive.

Some say he is Hiruko — the Leech Child, the first defective birth of Izanagi and Izanami, the child born before they learned to perform the creation rite correctly (the woman spoke first; the order was wrong). Hiruko was put in a reed boat and set to sea. He drifted. The Kojiki does not say where he drifted to, but later tradition says he eventually washed ashore and was found by the Ainu people of the north, or by fishermen on the Hyogo coast, and they raised him and he became Ebisu, the patron of the fishing villages.

Other traditions say he is simply a native deity of the coast, older than the mythology organized around him, a local kami of fish and fortune who was folded into the Seven Lucky Gods roster when that roster was assembled in the Muromachi period.

Both origins serve the same function: Ebisu is the deity who began with nothing, who was cast out or came from nowhere, and who found abundance by being exactly where he was.

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The fish he catches is a tai — the red sea bream, the most auspicious fish in Japanese cuisine, served at every celebration. In an ordinary sense, he catches this fish and it is lucky. But in the deeper sense, the tai under his arm is not a catch but a companion. Ebisu has been sitting on this rock long enough that the fish has simply come to him.

This is the theology of Ebisu, unstated but implied by every image: the fisherman who forces the fish will deplete the sea. The fisherman who sits in the right posture, at the right place, with the right spirit, will find the sea providing. The abundance of commerce and fishing comes not from taking but from being present in the right relationship.

The fishing villages of Japan know this in a practical way: the sea can be depleted. A season of over-fishing is followed by years of empty nets. Ebisu knows this too. He holds a rod. He laughs. He waits.

In October, when all the other gods of Japan are said to leave their shrines and travel to Izumo for the divine congress, Ebisu stays. He is a little deaf — the old tradition says he cannot hear the summons. He stays at his post. He keeps the fish running. He keeps the boats returning to harbor.

He is the only member of the divine assembly who is hard of hearing, and he is the one who stays on duty when everyone else goes to the meeting.

The fishermen love him for exactly this reason.