Raijin and Fūjin (thunder and wind)
Raijin is the kami of thunder, drawn since the Kamakura period as a demon inside a ring of linked drums. Fūjin is the god of the winds, who carries the winds in a bag. Tawaraya Sōtatsu’s screens show the two together.
Meaning
The Encyclopedia of Shinto defines raijin simply as “thunder kami”. In ancient Japan thunder and lightning were the violent acts of a thunder kami, and a strike was the kami appearing on earth: kaminari, the word for thunder, can be read as “kami sounding”, and a lightning strike was called kandachi, “kami standing”. The encyclopedia records that from around the Kamakura period pictures and sculptures gave raijin a demonic form holding a whip, ringed by linked drums. Fūjin, the wind god, is in Henri Joly’s description of 1908 a figure with a demon’s head who holds a bag of winds, the winds escaping from one end. Joly adds that Fūjin is sometimes shown with Raijin, and Tawaraya Sōtatsu painted them as a pair. Raijin is also a kami in Shinto, with shrines dedicated to it.
Origin and history
In the oldest texts, the encyclopedia notes, raijin appears as a serpent or a small child. The demon with drums came later. In the Heian period lightning came to be read as the curse of goryō, vengeful spirits of the dead, and once that belief attached to the wrongfully exiled courtier Sugawara no Michizane, a cult arose to the kami Karai Tenjin, “fire-and-thunder heavenly kami”, through which raijin came to be worshipped as part of the cult of Tenjin.
Thunder, rain and rice
For farmers, the encyclopedia says, raijin was a guardian of agriculture who brought the rain. The words for lightning, inazuma and inabikari, contain ina, rice stalks, and people believed that lightning fertilized the rice plant. Where lightning struck a field, fresh-cut bamboo and a sacred rope (shimenawa) set up on the spot promised a good harvest, and rain invocations (amagoi) were held at raijin’s shrines. The same kami could ruin a crop. In some places thunder during rice planting prompted a rite called kandachioi, in which people beat split bamboo or tied scythe blades to bamboo poles to drive raijin off.
How Edo-period art drew them
Joly describes the Thunder God of Japanese art as red, with a demon’s face and two claws on each foot, carrying a drum or a wheel of drums on his back. Artists liked to make fun of him: his drum is burst and needs mending, mice are eating it, or he has fallen out of the sky, damaged his drums and is rubbing the bruise. Fūjin appears with a spear and a red pennant as one of the Twelve Deva Kings, or without the spear, holding his bag in both hands. The drums are often painted with the mitsudomoe, three commas in a ring. When the Mongol fleets came, in the legend Joly gives, a storm drove them off and only three men survived to tell of it, and artists often show Raijin taking Japan’s side.
Sōtatsu’s screens
Nippon.com calls Fūjin raijin-zu (Wind and Thunder Gods), painted by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (1570–1640), perhaps Japan’s most famous pair of screens. It is read from right to left: the Wind God on the right-hand screen first, then the Thunder God on the left. The original belongs to the temple of Kenninji in Kyoto, which shows a replica; the original, a National Treasure, is kept at the Kyoto National Museum.
Often confused with
With their horns and fangs, both gods look like oni, and Joly notes that the Thunder God can be shown hiding under a hat from a shower of beans “like an ordinary Oni”, the beans thrown to drive demons out.
Read next
- Next in Japanese symbolsKamon (family crests) and the mitsudomoeKamon are Japanese family crests: small badges of a plant, a bird, an object or a pattern, often set in a circle and worn on formal dress. The mitsudomoe, three comma shapes swirling in a ring, is one of the commonest, on shrines and on drums.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsBese SakaBese Saka, a bunch of kola nuts, is the adinkra symbol of affluence, abundance and unity.
See also
Oni (and the oni mask), Japanese dragon (ryū), Oni (and the oni mask), Torii (shrine gate), Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Amaterasu (the sun kami).
Sources
- Raijin (Encyclopedia of Shinto), Encyclopedia of Shinto, Kokugakuin University, “Raijin” (Suzuki Kentarō), Kokugakuin University, entry text
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), nos. 719 (“Raiden”), 207 (“Fujin”) and 112 (“Cock on drum”)
- Nippon.com, Japan Data: folding screens, “Byōbu: Japanese Folding Screens”, Japan Data, Nippon.com (Nippon Communications Foundation), Nippon.com, “A Pair of Two-Panel Screens”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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