Seven gods in one boat, and only one of them is Japanese.
Ebisu, Daikokuten, Bishamonten, Benzaiten, Fukurokuju, Jurōjin, Hotei. They arrive together, by boat, on the night the year turns.
Only Ebisu is from here — the fisherman with a sea bream under one arm and a rod in the other hand, god of honest trade and, in Osaka, of business. Daikokuten was the Hindu Mahākāla, black and terrible, long before he was the smiling one standing on two rice bales with a mallet. Bishamonten was Vaiśravaṇa, guardian of the north, and still wears armour. Benzaiten, the only woman, was the river goddess Sarasvatī, and the water is still in her — she holds a biwa, and everything about her is music and flow. Fukurokuju and Jurōjin came out of Chinese Taoism. Hotei was a real man: Budai, a Chinese monk who died in 916 and carried everything he owned in one cloth sack.
Seven separate models, each with its own attributes fixed by four centuries of use.
Cast one at a time in Takaoka, not as a group.
Chased by hand — the faces are where a poor casting shows.
Coloured as a set, so the seven match when they stand together.
Nothing about that assembly is tidy. Three countries and at least three religions in a single boat. It is also exactly why the group is Japanese — they were gathered up in the Muromachi period out of whatever was to hand, and the number was fixed at seven to match the seven virtues.
The boat is the takarabune, the treasure ship. On the second night of the new year you slide a picture of it under your pillow, and whatever comes is the hatsuyume — the first dream, the one that is supposed to tell you about the year ahead.
In bronze they are almost always made as a set of seven in a fitted paulownia box, and Takaoka has been pouring them for four hundred years. Sets get split up: one god goes to a grandchild, one gets broken, one is sold alone. A complete seven, with its box and its papers, is not a common thing to find.
In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga built a castle at Takaoka and settled seven casting families in a quarter beside it, the district still called Kanayamachi — the metal-workers' town. (Where exactly the seven came from is given differently in different accounts.) The castle was abandoned within six years. The foundry quarter was not, and it is still there.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.
