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Category: Kawara

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  • Shachihoko: The Fire-Guarding Sea Creatures on Japan’s Castle Roofs (and the Secret in Nagoya’s Golden Scales)

    Shachihoko: The Fire-Guarding Sea Creatures on Japan’s Castle Roofs (and the Secret in Nagoya’s Golden Scales)

    Stand in front of almost any old castle keep in Japan and your eyes go where the builders wanted them to go: up the white walls, past the curving eaves, all the way to the ridge. And there, at both ends of the highest beam, something is doing a handstand.

    Illustration: a pair of golden tiger-headed shachihoko fish with tails raised, perched on a roof ridge amid swirling ink clouds, rain and stylized waves
    AI-generated illustration

    It has the head of a tiger, or maybe a dragon. Its body is a fish, covered in scales. Its tail is flung straight at the sky, as if it dove off the roof and froze halfway down. Some are gilded. Most are the soft grey of fired clay.

    This is a shachihoko, often just called shachi. If you watched any of the Asian Games in Aichi and Nagoya, which closed on October 4, 2026, you have already met a friendly version of it: the official mascot, Honohon, was designed after the shachihoko. The real thing is older, stranger, and much more serious about its job.

    The golden shachihoko (kinshachi) at both ends of the top ridge of Nagoya Castle's green-roofed keep
    Photo: Alpsdake / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

    A fish that swallows the sea

    In Japanese folklore, the shachihoko is a sea creature from the cold northern ocean. Its fins and tail always point toward heaven, and its back bristles with sharp spines. Most importantly, it can swallow huge amounts of water, hold it in its belly, call up clouds, and bring rain.

    That last power explains why it lives on a roof instead of in the sea.

    Old Japanese buildings were made of wood. Temples, gates, palaces and castle keeps could survive centuries of earthquakes and typhoons and then vanish in a single night of fire. So builders placed a creature of water at the very top of the building. According to the legend, if fire ever broke out, the shachihoko would release the water it carried and put the flames out.

    It is a charm, not a sprinkler system. But stand under one and you can feel the logic: this is the highest point, the place a spark from a neighboring fire would land, and here sits a beast that belongs to the ocean.

    Where the shachihoko came from

    The idea did not start in Japan. Long before shachihoko, Chinese roofs carried ridge-end ornaments meant to protect buildings from fire, and that tradition made its way to Japan. The Japanese shachihoko grew out of it.

    It took a while to settle on a name. Old Japanese writings call these ornaments by Chinese-style names, and the word shachihoko only became the usual name from the middle of the Edo period. The creature itself appears earlier: a picture scroll from around 1295 already shows one sitting on a roof.

    For a long time, shachihoko decorated temples and shrines. Then the warlords took notice. Oda Nobunaga is said to have used them on the keep of his Azuchi Castle, and from there they spread to castle roofs across the country. Under Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi, some shachihoko had gold leaf on their faces and fins. The fire charm had become a sign of power, and whoever lived under the gold was telling everyone how much they owned.

    Why they come in pairs

    Look closely and you will usually find two shachihoko on one ridge, one at each end. Very often they are a male and a female. The male has its mouth open and the female has its mouth closed, like the pairs of guardian lion-dogs (komainu) at a shrine entrance. One mouth makes the first sound, “a,” and the other the last sound, “un.” Together they cover everything from beginning to end.

    There are exceptions. At Himeji Castle, only a single old model survived to copy, so the keep’s shachihoko were all rebuilt in the same form, and whether that model was male or female is still uncertain.

    Clay, gold and copper

    Most shachihoko on castle keeps and gates are fired clay, made as special roof tiles. Clay shachihoko are hollow, which makes them fragile. They are fixed onto a vertical rod rising out of the ridge. Others are carved from wood and covered in copper sheet, and a few are cast in bronze.

    Then there are the famous golden ones.

    The golden shachi of Nagoya Castle

    When Nagoya Castle’s enormous keep was finished in 1612, a pair of golden shachihoko went on top. They showed off the power of Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family. An old song from the Edo period claimed they shone so brightly that fish would not come near the shore at nearby Atsuta. Travelers on the Tokaido road sang about them too.

    Gold is tempting, though. Whenever the Owari domain ran short of money, it looked at its shachi, and before the Meiji era the gold was recast three times.

    The originals guarded the castle for 333 years. In May 1945, an air raid burned the keep, and the golden shachi with it. The people of Nagoya rebuilt them from detailed survey drawings, and the second-generation pair now sits on top of the reconstructed keep.

    By the official castle figures, the pair is clad in 18-karat gold plates just 0.15 mm thick:

    • North (male): 2.621 m tall, 1,272 kg, 112 scales, 44.69 kg of 18k gold
    • South (female): 2.579 m tall, 1,215 kg, 126 scales, 43.39 kg of 18k gold

    The male is bigger, but the female has more scales.

    The secret in the scales

    Some scales from the original shachi survived the 1945 fire, and they are still carefully kept today. For years, though, they posed a small mystery. Some look almost pure gold to the eye, yet earlier X-ray analysis did not find especially high gold levels in them.

    In August 2026, a team from Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), the Nagoya Castle Research Center, the National Museum of Nature and Science and others published an answer. Using a beam of negative muons at the J-PARC research facility, they analyzed seven surviving scales without damaging them, measuring the metal at different depths below the surface.

    In five of the seven, gold became more concentrated toward the surface, within about 10 micrometers of it, reaching roughly 65 to 90 percent gold depending on the scale. A patch that seems to be a later repair showed almost no change with depth, unlike the original metal. The researchers say this points to a deliberate historical surface treatment that concentrated gold at the very skin of each scale, which would explain the deep golden shine.

    In other words, the brilliance that kept the fish away from Atsuta beach may have been engineered, one scale at a time.

    How to see shachihoko on your trip

    • Nagoya Castle is the classic place to see them, and an easy day trip if you are based in Kyoto. The reconstructed keep is currently closed to visitors, according to the castle’s official website (checked October 2026), but the golden shachi can be seen from the castle grounds. Bring a zoom lens or binoculars.
    • Look at every castle you visit. Keeps, turrets and gatehouses often carry clay shachihoko. Compare the tails: some fan out like a fan, others split in two.
    • Check the mouths. Find the pair and see which one is open.
    • Look at temple roofs too. Ridge ends are where Japanese builders put their protectors: shachihoko on some roofs, demon-faced onigawara tiles on others. Once you start looking up, Japanese skylines stop being background.

    A beast that stands on its head

    In Japanese, the word shachihoko-baru, to stand stiffly like a shachihoko, describes someone who is tense and overly formal. It is a funny image for a creature that spends its whole life upside down on a rooftop.

    But maybe that stiffness is the point. For centuries these fish have held the same pose through storms, sieges, recastings and fire, keeping the ocean in their bellies and waiting for the night they are needed. Next time you walk under a Japanese roof, look up and say hello. One of them may be looking back with its mouth open, and the other with its mouth firmly shut.

    Sources & Further Reading

    See Japanese roof-tile craft up close in Kyoto

    If this story has you looking up at rooftops, you can see the tile-maker’s craft at eye level in Kyoto’s Higashiyama, near Gojo Ohashi bridge. Kawarakoubou YOU-ya is a kawara (roof tile) workshop and gallery where you can also shape your own demon-faced onigawara tile from clay.

  • Onigawara: The Demon Roof Tiles Guarding Kyoto — and How to Make One With Your Own Hands

    Onigawara: The Demon Roof Tiles Guarding Kyoto — and How to Make One With Your Own Hands

    Walk through Higashiyama on an autumn afternoon and the air is already cooler than it was at noon. Maple leaves beyond a paper screen have started to flush. Somewhere nearby, a temple bell settles into silence. And above a courtyard wall, at the blunt end of a ridge line, a face is watching: teeth bared, brows knotted, silver-grey clay catching the late light.

    Illustration: a silver-grey demon-faced onigawara tile watching from the end of a tiled roof ridge, with red maple leaves drifting across a pale autumn sky
    AI-generated illustration

    That face was an onigawara: a Japanese demon-faced roof tile. Not a Halloween mask. Not a joke. A piece of architecture that has been finishing, weatherproofing, and — in the old way of thinking — guarding Japanese roofs for centuries.

    If you are traveling to Kyoto this autumn, you will walk under dozens of them without knowing. This is a guide to seeing them clearly — and, if you like, to shaping a small one yourself from clay, then waiting for the kiln to turn it into something that can sit in your home.

    A weathered demon-faced onigawara ridge-end tile on a temple roof at Myoshin-ji in Kyoto, against a blue sky
    Photo: Hyppolyte de Saint-Rambert / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

    What onigawara are (and what “demon” really means)

    Onigawara (鬼瓦) is written with the characters for oni (ogre / demon) and kawara (roof tile). The literal English “demon roof tile” sounds ominous. In practice, the name covers a whole family of ridge-end tiles — the special tiles fitted where a main ridge or a descending ridge terminates.

    Some onigawara show a fierce face. Others show lotus blossoms, clouds, family crests, or animals, because the motif is not always an oni. Still, the demon face is the image most travelers remember — and the one that carries the strongest story.

    That story is not “evil lives on the roof.” It is closer to this: a terrifying face can frighten away misfortune. The same protective instinct that put fierce guardian statues at temple gates put staring eyes on the ridge. The tile also does ordinary work — it closes a vulnerable junction of the roof against rain and wind. Symbol and structure sit in the same piece of fired clay.

    Japanese tile-making has a surprisingly precise starting point. According to the Nihon Shoki, Japan’s oldest official chronicle, in 588 the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent temple builders, a painter, and four “tile masters” to help build Asuka-dera, the country’s first full-scale Buddhist temple. And the earliest ridge-end tiles were not demons at all. Most carried lotus flowers. Only from the Nara period onward did the fierce face become the dominant design, and the name oni-gawara stuck. Today the word covers every ridge-end tile, face or no face. Some even carry the character for “water” (水), a quiet wish that fire would stay away.

    So when you hear “demon,” hear guardian. The face is meant to stand between the house and harm.

    How to spot them when you walk Kyoto’s temples

    Kyoto trains the eye downward — stone paths, moss, shop fronts, matcha. Onigawara ask you to look up.

    Try this on your next temple or machiya walk:

    1. Find the main ridge — the highest horizontal line of the roof.
    2. Follow it to either end. That blunt termination is where a ridge-end tile often sits.
    3. On larger temple halls, check the ends of descending ridges too, where the roof steps down toward the eaves.
    4. Notice color. Traditional sangawara-style tiles often read as dark grey to soft silver after years of weather. Fresh clay and aged roofs do not look the same.
    5. Do not expect every ridge end to show teeth. A crest, a lotus, or a cloud scroll is still part of the same family of finishing tiles.

    Autumn helps. After summer haze thins, and before winter snow softens every outline, the silhouette of a Kyoto roof becomes very readable against a clear sky. Stand in a courtyard after the tour groups pass. Let your gaze climb the tiles one course at a time until the ridge ends. The face — if there is one — will feel less like decoration and more like a presence that has been working overtime for a very long time.

    Inside temple halls you will meet other guardians — painted dragons on ceilings, stone deities in the garden, fierce protectors at the gate. Onigawara belong to that same vocabulary of watchfulness. Different materials, same old wish: may this place be kept safe.

    Making a small onigawara with your hands

    Seeing a face on a roof is one kind of encounter. Pressing clay into a face of your own is another.

    A few tile workshops in Japan let visitors shape a small onigawara themselves, and Kyoto has at least one near the old temple districts of Higashiyama. The flow is usually simple:

    Clay first. It cools the fingers, sticks under the nails, and smells faintly of earth. Wear clothes that can get dirty; this is not a white-gloves craft.

    Then the face. With a craftsman’s guidance, you shape a compact ridge-end tile with a demon expression. It is not a copy of a temple giant, just a small original that only your hands made.

    Then the wait. Your tile is finished afterward in silver using a traditional smoking technique, so you usually leave without your piece. It follows you home later, in the soft silver-grey of a Kyoto roof. That pause is part of the craft. Clay does not hurry.

    When it arrives, set it by a doorway or on a shelf. The same protective idea that once lived only on temple ridges can sit quietly indoors, as a small guardian you shaped yourself.

    Practical tips

    • Book ahead. Small workshops run on reservations, and autumn weekends in Kyoto fill fast.
    • Pair it with a temple walk. Look up at the ridges in the morning, then make your own tile in the afternoon.
    • Expect limited English. Gestures and patience do a lot of the work, and that is part of meeting a working craftsman.
    • Plan for shipping. You leave without your piece; the finished tile follows you home.

    A face on the ridge, a face in your hands

    Kyoto’s roofs are easy to treat as background. Once you learn the word onigawara, the skyline changes. Every temple walk becomes a scavenger hunt for ridge ends. Every demon face becomes a reminder that Japanese architecture never separated beauty from protection.

    And if you take an afternoon in Higashiyama to press clay into a frown and a pair of staring eyes, you will understand something a photograph cannot give you: the weight of the material, the stubbornness of a mouth you shaped too narrow and then opened again, the strange tenderness of waiting for fire to finish what your fingers began.

    When the silver tile finally reaches you, set it where morning light finds it. You will have carried a piece of Kyoto’s roof tradition home — not as a souvenir sticker, but as a guardian you met halfway.

    Sources & Further Reading

    Visit / make in Kyoto

    Kawarakoubou Youya (瓦工房YOU家) — workshop, gallery, and kawara craft in Higashiyama, near Gojo Ohashi.