Raijin

You've seen him. He's on the right-hand panel of one of the most famous paintings in Japan — Sōtatsu's screen — with a ring of drums arranged around his shoulders, mallets raised, riding the storm.

Raijin. The thunder god.

That drum-ring iconography has a long pedigree — it runs back to the Mogao cave murals in China, sixth century, and travelled east from there.

And he has ox horns and a tiger-skin loincloth.

Which, if you've read the oni entry, means something specific: he is dressed as a demon. The record says it plainly — he embodies demonic characteristics, reflecting his association with the northeast, the demon gate.

A god classed as an oni. The bad compass-corner, given a face and a percussion section.

Where he comes from is worse than you'd expect

The Kojiki is specific, and it's grim.

When Izanagi goes down into the land of the dead to bring his wife back, he lights a comb-tooth as a torch and looks at her — against her explicit instruction.

And what he sees is her body decomposing. Covered in maggots.

And eight thunder gods have arisen from the rot.

One from her head. Others from her chest, her belly, her limbs. Eight of them, generated out of a corpse.

And it is these thunders — along with the hags of the underworld — that Izanami sends chasing him up the slope, in the founding pursuit of Japanese mythology.

So Japan's thunder is, at origin, a dead woman's fury given rank.

Her husband broke his promise, looked at her at her worst, and ran. What came out of her body to chase him is now a god with a shrine and a drum kit.

And now he guards the gates

Here's the arc.

With his twin Fūjin, the wind god, Raijin stands at temple gates all over Japan — most famously at Kaminarimon, the "Thunder Gate," the enormous red lantern entrance to Sensō-ji in Asakusa that every visitor to Tokyo photographs.

The pair at Sanjūsangen-dō are National Treasures.

Two weather gods, dressed as demons, born from a corpse and a curse — standing at the door of a temple as security.

That's the pacification arc built into the architecture. The tradition's answer to a dangerous power is never destruction; it's a posting. Give it a gate to stand at and a job to do.

The family firm

He has a household.

Twin Fūjin, the wind.

A son, Raitarō.

And a beast — the raijū, the thunder animal, which falls with lightning strikes and claws up trees.

Thunder as a family business, with a pet.

The navel racket

This is the part that is still alive, and I mean this week.

The thunder god steals children's navels in summer.

So when a storm comes, you cover your belly.

Japanese grandmothers still say this. Children still hear it. The word goes out at the first rumble — heso wo kakuse, hide your belly button — and small children in the twenty-first century put their hands over their stomachs because a god with a drum ring might be coming for them.

The suggested origin is unnervingly plausible: lightning burn patterns on the body, and where they concentrate.

And the god and the beast run it together. The raijū is said to sleep in human navels, and when Raijin calls the lightning it wakes violently and injures the person it was sleeping in.

God and pet, operating one belly-protection racket across a whole country, for centuries, and it's the single most-repeated piece of folklore any Japanese child will ever be told.

And a ghost took the job

Last thing, and it's the one that ties the systems together.

Sugawara no Michizane — the exiled scholar, the greatest vengeful spirit in Japanese history, who came back as lightning that struck the emperor's own hall — transformed into a thunder deity after death.

His name as a god is Tenjin. Heaven-thunder.

So the weather pantheon and the wrath system share a personnel file.

The office of thunder was not a closed shop. The angriest courtier in Japanese history was, in the end, promoted into the sky's percussion section — and now teenagers ask him for help with their exams.