Egara Tenjin Shrine: Where Cartoonists Retire Their Brushes

A picture from the sky

The picture showed Tenjin, dressed in black court robes. The people who found it were awed enough to build a shrine and place it inside.

Tenjin is Sugawara no Michizane, a ninth-century scholar and statesman who was deified after his death. Today he is best known as the god of learning, and his shrines fill up with students before entrance exams.

With the picture safely enshrined, there remained the question of the ground it had landed on. The answer now stands about 25 metres tall. The shrine’s ginkgo is said to be around 900 years old, and tradition says it was planted so that no one would tread on the spot where the picture came down.

Nine centuries on, I doubt anyone would even think of it.

Keep out

To the right of the main hall, two tunnels have been cut into the hillside. These are yagura, medieval chambers found around Kamakura and thought to have been used for burials or memorial rites. The two are connected inside.

A sign asks visitors to keep out. I stayed on the right side of it. The ferns have been allowed in.

One hundred and fifty-four kappa

Then there is the name. Egara, as it happens, is also a Japanese word for a picture or design. The characters are different, but for a shrine that began with a picture, the name fits rather well.

It fits the next part of the story, too. In 1971, the cartoonist Shimizu Kon, a Kamakura resident, dedicated a brush here. Shimizu was known for his kappa, the river creatures of Japanese folklore, usually drawn with a beak, a shell and a dish of water on the head. His were friendlier than most and spent years advertising sake.

The brush was one he had bought at a second-hand shop in Kamakura and used for his work. It rests beneath a low stone monument carved with one of his kappa, sitting with one knee raised and an enormous brush over its shoulder. I walked round the back to find an inscription by the novelist Kawabata Yasunari.

Behind it stands something much less modest. Shimizu died in 1974. In 1989, fellow cartoonists led by Yokoyama Ryūichi and Kojima Kō raised it to carry on what he had started. It is bronze, about three metres tall and weighs 800 kilograms. Its name, Efudezuka, means roughly “memorial mound for paintbrushes”.

Brushes into smoke

The brushes are not simply kept here. Every October, the shrine holds the Efudezuka Festival. Old brushes are gathered, cartoonists fill a large sheet of card with drawings meant to last only that day, and both are burned in a memorial rite.

I was there in September, a few weeks too early for the smoke.

In February, the shrine does something similar for sewing needles, which are laid to rest in a block of tofu.