Ebisu

In ancient Japanese, ebisu (蝦夷) was not a divine name but an ethnic term. It labeled the Emishi, the peoples of northeastern Honshu and Hokkaido who resisted Yamato expansion during the Nara period (710-794 CE). The word carried connotations of wildness, of belonging outside the civilized world. It was the same word, in an older form, that the Kojiki recorded in 712 CE for the primordial child cast out by the creator gods.

The deity now called Ebisu appears in the Kojiki as Hiruko, the leech-child of Izanagi and Izanami. Born malformed, cast upon the sea in a reed boat, Hiruko drifted to shore and was eventually venerated as a god of boundaries and outside forces. The association with fishermen came naturally: he arrived from the sea, and fisherfolk lived at the margins of the rice-farming world. By the Heian period (794-1185), this outcast deity had acquired a new name: Ebisu, the fortunate outsider.

Nishinomiya Shrine in Hyogo prefecture became the chief home of Ebisu worship by the 10th century. Merchants and fishermen who could not easily travel to Ise or Nara found Ebisu more accessible. His iconography was fixed by the Kamakura period (1185-1333): a stout, smiling fisherman holding a sea bream and a fishing rod, always depicted laughing. The characters eventually written for his name, 恵比須, were phonetic dressing for a very old word, chosen to sound right rather than to mean anything in particular.

In 1890, the Sapporo Brewery named its premium lager Yebisu, using the old romanization of the deity's name. The Yebisu factory in Tokyo eventually gave its name to the surrounding neighborhood and the train station. Today Ebisu is simultaneously a Shinto deity, a beer brand, a Tokyo district, and a symbol of the commercial luck that began when a castaway god washed up on a shore nobody owned.