Raijin and Fujin: Thunder and Wind

They do not travel together because they are friends.

They travel together because storms are like that — wind comes first, tearing through the village, stripping the thatch from the roofs, bending the young rice flat in the paddies. Then the thunder follows, beating his drums of cloud until the sky shakes, and the lightning that leaps between his drum-strikes sets fire to the dry things the wind has scattered. The rain comes after, and it is the rain that matters, the rain that has been necessary for three weeks while the paddies cracked.

But first: the wind. Then: the thunder.

Fujin carries his wind in a great bag slung over his shoulder — a leopard-skin bag, some painters show it, full of every gust and current in the sky. His body is green, or blue-green, the color of air visible at depth. His face is wide-eyed, mouth open, a being of pure velocity. He opens the bag and the wind comes out.

Raijin circles the sky on a ring of drums. He is red, the color of lightning-struck earth, with pointed fangs and a demon’s grin. Each drum makes a different thunder: the low rumble, the crack, the sustained roar over mountains. He beats them in sequence and the sky answers.

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In Buddhist cosmology they are demonic beings — onigami, demon-gods, creatures of the sixth heaven who were converted to Buddhism and set to work as protectors of temples. The great screen paintings in Kyoto’s Kennin-ji, attributed to the seventeenth-century master Tawaraya Sotatsu, show them in exactly this form: two wild figures on gold leaf, one green and one red, leaping across the sky with their instruments.

But in the rice-farming villages they are something more complex. You want Fujin to leave your roof alone. You want Raijin to stop starting fires. But you need what comes after them. The rain that the storm front carries is the difference between a harvest and a failed season. The farmers who pray before the planting pray to the sky deities, including these two, because there is no separating the destruction from the gift.

The thunderclap is the thing that frightens children into their mothers’ arms.

It is also the thing that breaks the drought.

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There is a story told about Raijin and the naval invasion of Kublai Khan in 1274 and again in 1281. The Mongol fleet, having crossed the Korea Strait and anchored in Hakata Bay, was struck by storms so ferocious that both fleets were destroyed before they could complete their landings. The Japanese called these storms kamikaze — divine wind — and attributed them to the intercession of the gods on Japan’s behalf.

Whether or not the attribution is accurate, the psychology is precise: the same destructive storm-deity who tears the roofs off villages is the one who sinks the enemy fleet in the harbor. The terror of the sky is not randomly distributed. It falls where it falls, and the living arrange their survival around the arbitrary pattern and call it divine intention.

Fujin opens his bag.

Raijin beats his drums.

The farmers cover their heads and run for cover, and the paddies drink.