The Snake and the Dragon in One Water God

The snake, which likes wetlands, was for the Jomon people a "messenger of the water god" or the water god itself.

In the later Yayoi period the idea of the dragon came from the continent and fused with the snake, Japan's old water god. That is why Japanese myth and tradition hold peculiar figures and beliefs in which dragon and snake are mixed. Put simply, one can first take it as "Jomon line is snake, Yayoi line is dragon."

Faith in Kuzuryu continues in many forms across the country today. A representative place is Kuzuryu Shrine in Ono, Fukui Prefecture, where the very name of the river is the Kuzuryu River, and there is also Lake Kuzuryu. This old shrine, built at the headwaters of the Kuzuryu River, keeps a tradition praising the dragon god for calming the flooding river and watering its basin.

At shrines in many places there is a strong tendency to enshrine the dragon as a water god, and it is revered as a guardian that protects a region not only from flood but from disaster. When you visit a shrine, for example, the first place worshipers go to purify body and mind is the temizuya, the water basin, and the very many designs there in which water flows from the mouth of a bronze dragon also come from the dragon being the god that governs water.

Why was the dragon painted on the ceiling of a Zen hall? Because the dragon guards the Buddhist law as "Tenryu," one of the "eight kinds of guardians," and it was believed that painting a dragon on the ceiling would make "rain of the Law" fall. This means "spreading the blessing of the Buddhist law," and at the same time holds the wish that the dragon, a water god, protect the temple from fire.

Such dragon faith exists in countless forms across the country, and I too regularly visit places that enshrine dragons and offer prayer. In many cases dragon-god faith also served as a symbol of flood control and regional unity, which were hard problems for rulers, and it must not be missed that it grew tied to rain-praying and prayers for a good harvest.

Interestingly, Japanese fusui was replaced by another word, "chisui" (治水), literally "to govern water." The basic idea of Japanese city design includes governing water, and enshrining the dragon god, the god of water, is in the end the remnant of wisdom handed down in an unbroken line: that life is made by governing water.

Dragon gods are tied to belief in water because Japan was once a land blessed with rich and pure water. Environmental pollution of the modern age has wiped out 99 percent of the clear streams, but countless rivers still flow across the archipelago, and they were once worshipped as dragons.

A raging river is a river that floods, a main cause that has troubled the Japanese since so long ago that it appears in myth, and it was taken as "the dragon rages." Because flooding by a raging river was the same as a dragon raging, rites were performed to calm the raging dragon. Calming the dragon is called "ryuchin" (龍鎮), and in the mountains of Nara Prefecture, which I often visit, traces of this belief remain.

While that idea was nurtured at the bottom, the globe was later imported by Portuguese missionaries and an eye for seeing the shape of the Japanese archipelago on a large scale was gradually cultivated, and people noticed that the shape of the Japanese archipelago itself is like a dragon.

From the view that the archipelago's shape is a dragon, Japan came in time to be called "a country ruled by dragon gods." Belief in dragon gods is practiced in Japan in countless forms, large and small, and there are many places across the country that enshrine dragon gods in their own way.