Raijin- Japanese GodDeity"God of Thunder"

Born from Death

Izanami died giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi and descended to Yomi, the realm of the dead. Her husband Izanagi followed. She begged him not to look at her. He lit a torch anyway.

Her body was rotting, crawling with maggots. Eight thunder kami had emerged from her decomposing flesh: Ō-Ikazuchi, Great Thunder, at her head, and six more down to Fushi-Ikazuchi, Crouching Thunder, at her right foot. They covered her from crown to sole. When Izanagi turned and ran, the eight chased him through the dark passages of Yomi until he sealed the entrance with a boulder.

Raijin inherited their power. His thunder did not descend from the sky. It rose from the earth, from a dead goddess's body.

The Storm Pair

Raijin's constant companion is Fūjin, the god of wind. Raijin beats a ring of connected taiko drums that floats around him. Each strike of his bachi is a peal of thunder. Fūjin carries an enormous bag from which he releases winds. Together they are the storm: wind first, then thunder.

Red-skinned where Fūjin is green, horned and fanged where Fūjin is goggle-eyed and alien, Raijin wears a tiger-skin loincloth and bares his teeth in a permanent shout. His face is an oni's face. Thunder was the force that earned it.

Michizane's Thunder

The scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane died in exile in 903 CE. In the years that followed, devastating thunderstorms struck the capital. Lightning killed several of his political enemies. The great audience hall of the imperial palace was struck while courtiers who had orchestrated his downfall sat inside.

The Kitano Tenjin engi emaki, thirteenth-century illustrated scrolls depicting Michizane's posthumous vengeance, show storm demons amid the clouds above the capital, their imagery drawn from Raijin's own iconography. The dead scholar's fury and the thunder god's power had become the same force.

The Thunder Beast

Japanese folklore gives Raijin a companion creature: the raijū, a supernatural beast that rides within thunderstorms and falls to earth when lightning strikes. Regional traditions describe it as a weasel wreathed in lightning or a wolf composed of electrical fire. When a storm passes, the raijū nestles into the splintered trees or scorched ground at the strike point, and Raijin hurls thunderbolts to rouse it back to the sky.

The raijū could slip into the navels of sleeping people during storms. Across pre-modern Japan, children learned to cover their belly buttons when thunder rolled.

The Thunder Gate

The Kaminarimon at Sensō-ji in Tokyo's Asakusa district takes its name from Raijin: the Thunder Gate. Statues of Raijin and Fūjin flank the entrance, one on each side. Though the current statues date from 1960, the gate itself has stood in some form since 942 CE.

At Sanjūsangen-dō in Kyoto, thirteenth-century wooden sculptures of Raijin and Fūjin stand among a thousand statues of Kannon. Kamakura-period sculptors of the Kei school carved Raijin in mid-strike, his body coiled, his drumsticks raised, every muscle tensed around the thunderclap about to land. Both sculptures are designated National Treasures.

The image that fixed Raijin in the Japanese imagination came later. Around 1630, Tawaraya Sōtatsu painted Fūjin Raijin-zu, a pair of folding screens now at Kennin-ji in Kyoto. On a field of gold leaf, Raijin lunges from one screen while Fūjin rushes from the other. The drums wheel around him. His face burns with the storm's own fury. Between the two figures: empty gold, charged with the instant before thunder breaks.