Japan lies at the junction of four of the world’s great tectonic plates (including the three largest ones): the immense Pacific oceanic plate, the North American continental plate, the Eurasian continental plate, and the Philippine oceanic plate all intersect at or near the island nation. The continental plates wrench against each and smash the heavy basalt oceanic plates down into the depths of the planet. As this happens, Japan is wracked by earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis.
Japan’s terrifying natural phenomena were not properly connected to these large scale movements of the lithosphere until the elegant plate tectonics paradigms of Arthur Holmes and Harry Hammond Hess became widely accepted (a fundamental breakthrough of planetary understanding which did not take place until the 1950’s and 1960’s!). Traditional Japanese mythology, however, has a surprisingly apt analogy. According to Shinto lore, the Japanese islands lie on top of an immense catfish, Namazu. Namazu is restrained by means of a huge rock controlled by the god Kashima (which seems like a reasonably good metaphor for the continental plates riding over the oceanic plates). Sometimes Kashima abandons his duties and the huge catfish’s struggles to escape cause particularly violent disasters.
Like many myths, the story of Namazu took on a political life of its own. During the late nineteenth century, because of a pun, the great catfish became conflated with the rapidly growing Meiji government bureaucracy. It was dangerous to make direct political statements in early industrial Japan and clever artists used fish as ambiguous stand-ins: bloated catfish could always be dismissed as harmless whimsy or traditional Shinto symbols. These Namazu-e woodblock prints are therefore peculiar and ambiguous in their own right. Sometimes the Namazu are the heroes who make the rich elite produce cash for the peasantry. Other times they crush all of the Japanese as they flounder. Still other pictures hearken back to ancient tradition and use the catfish to represent the horror of earthquakes and the capriciousness of the gods.
The Namazu has not disappeared in modern Japan. Bloated bureaucrats and terrible earthquakes still torment the islands. Fortunately Japan’s cult of the cute has come to the rescue and the great fish is less and less of an earthquake god and more of an endearing cartoon. In fact there is even a pokemon “Namazun” (bizarrely anglicized as “Whiscash”). I was going to tell you more about him but, for some reason, Whiscash’s Wiki page is vastly more complicated to understand than the pages concerning Shinto and plate tectonics.
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March 20, 2011 at 12:34 AM
tokyo5
The catfish is still used on earthquake safety signs in Japan today:
http://tokyo5.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/namazu/
March 27, 2011 at 12:32 AM
acpizza
Even stranger, recently Pokemon focused not on Japan, but Manhattan for the premier of its 5th generation version of the popular handheld game.. and Namazu wriggled directly under the largest portion of Japan that has *not* ever been featured in a Pokemon region.
Coincidence?
April 2, 2011 at 5:59 PM
John Sellers
In the namazu-e (gravure featuring namazu the catfish) you note that it might be a political allegory. In fact, the beliefs about the catfish evolved into a “god tears it down so we can rebuild better” idea. In that gravure, the dude at the top is Daikoku the god of wealth. He’s distributing money as a sign that things will be better.
April 4, 2011 at 11:54 PM
Hieronymo
Thanks for explaining the symbolism. I like the “god tears it down so we can rebuild better” idea. That seems like a typically robust Japanese philosophy for coming to terms with the vicissitudes of the world .
April 12, 2012 at 8:38 PM
jason
not to be childish buutt….why is the one guy pooping in the first picture what does that symbolize ?
May 3, 2012 at 5:43 PM
Wayne
Apparently that is Raijin, the thunder god, defecating drums.
April 18, 2012 at 5:27 PM
twixraider
News from the Namazu front:
http://namazueshirt.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/can-you-feel-it/
April 21, 2012 at 1:45 PM
Wayne
Thanks for keeping me up to date on Namazu!
July 4, 2019 at 6:24 PM
My Earthquake Brings All the Fish to the Pond | VoVatia
[…] pages I found with a Google search: A Brief Account of the Catfish as a Cultural Symbol in Japan The Earthquake Catfish (includes a reference to a Pokémon based on Namazu) Namazu: The Earthshaker (includes a picture of […]