Of the seven gods of good fortune who ride the treasure ship in New Year prints, six came from India or China. Ebisu is the only one who is Japanese, and he got the job by being thrown away.
The child in the reed boat
The Kojiki records that the first product of Izanagi and Izanami's union was Hiruko, the leech-child — a body without proper bones, born because the wedding circuit was performed with the woman speaking first. The parents put him in a boat of reeds and let the current take him, and the chronicle drops the subject entirely. He is not counted among their children.
That loose end sat unresolved for several centuries. By the medieval period, coastal communities around the Inland Sea had tied it off: the discarded child washed ashore, was raised by fishing people, and grew into a deity of the catch. Nishinomiya Shrine in Hyōgo, on the coast between Osaka and Kobe, is the head shrine of that identification and the centre of the Ebisu cult.
The identification is a medieval development and not in the Kojiki itself. Saying that the Kojiki calls Ebisu the leech-child gets the direction of travel backwards: later worshippers reached back into the chronicle and adopted an abandoned character.
A god who arrives from over the sea
The word ebisu independently means an outsider, a barbarian, someone from beyond — and it is the key to the whole cult. Fishing villages along the Japanese coast have a long-attested practice of treating things that come in on the tide as bringing fortune: a stone of unusual shape, a piece of driftwood, a drowned corpse, a whale, a shark. Any of these might be called ebisu, enshrined, and thanked for the season's catch. The god of the good haul is whatever the sea sends you.
A deity built out of that logic can absorb almost anything, which is why Ebisu attracts a second identification with Kotoshironushi, a son of Ōkuninushi who in the chronicles is found fishing at the cape when envoys arrive to demand the surrender of the land, and who answers by clapping his hands and vanishing beneath the water. Miho Shrine in Shimane holds that line. Neither identification has driven the other out.
The fish, the rod, and the reason he is smiling
His iconography is fixed and unusually cheerful. He wears the tall pointed kazaori eboshi cap of a courtier, carries a fishing rod in his right hand, and holds a red sea bream — tai, the most auspicious fish in Japan, punning on medetai, "auspicious" — under his left arm. He is stout, bearded and laughing.
The rod is the point. He fishes with a line rather than a net, which is understood as taking only what is honestly earned rather than sweeping the sea clean; the image is invoked in commercial contexts to mean fair dealing. That is how a fisherman's deity became a merchant's deity, and why he ended up with an equal claim on markets and shops.
Knocking on the wall at Nishinomiya
Ebisu is said to be hard of hearing. The practical consequence is a real and unusual ritual: at Nishinomiya and at many other Ebisu shrines, worshippers go round to the side or rear of the sanctuary after the normal offering and knock on the boards, or strike a wooden board provided for the purpose, to make sure they have been noticed. It is one of very few places in Japanese practice where the correct behaviour is to make more noise, not less.
The same deafness explains why he is often said to stay behind in the tenth lunar month, when the kami of Japan are believed to gather at Izumo and the month is called "the month without gods" everywhere else. He does not hear the summons, so he remains — and shrines hold Ebisu festivals in that month precisely because he is the deity still on duty.
The biggest observance is Tōka Ebisu around the tenth of January. At Nishinomiya it culminates in the fuku-otoko race: the gates open at six in the morning, several thousand people sprint two hundred and thirty metres to the main hall, and the first three are declared the lucky men of the year. It is broadcast nationally, and it is a serious enough scrum that runners train for it.
The treasure ship, and six imported colleagues
The Shichifukujin, seven gods of good fortune, are a syncretic set assembled in the late medieval period and popularised in the Edo period, sailing together on a treasure ship in the print you put under your pillow on the second night of the new year to secure a good first dream. Ebisu stands beside Daikokuten, who came from the Hindu-Buddhist Mahākāla; Benzaiten, from Sarasvatī; Bishamonten, from Vaiśravaṇa; Fukurokuju and Jurōjin, from Chinese Daoist star lore; and Hotei, from a Chinese Chan monk.
The pairing of Ebisu and Daikokuten is by far the strongest bond in the group. Their two figures stand together on shop shelves, on sake bottles, and on the wooden plaques of Ebisu-Daikoku shrines all over the country, one holding a fish and the other a mallet, covering respectively what comes in from outside and what accumulates at home.
The beer that named a district
In 1890 a Tokyo brewery launched a beer called Yebisu, using the older romanisation, with the god on the label. The freight station built to move it took the beer's name; the neighbourhood took the station's name; and Ebisu is now one of the most expensive districts in Tokyo, with a JR station whose departure jingle is The Third Man theme, from a 1960s beer commercial. The brewery site is Yebisu Garden Place. A discarded mythological infant is, by this route, a postcode.
In fiction he is a soft presence — a lucky-charm figure in Onmyōji and mobile gacha rosters, a shopkeeper's mascot, a Yo-kai Watch character. He rarely gets a plot, which is fitting for a deity whose defining quality is that he turned up and stayed.
Why is a god of luck also a god of the disabled?
Because the Kojiki is explicit that Hiruko could not stand at three years old, and communities that adopted him did not sand that off. Ebisu is petitioned in some places specifically on behalf of children with disabilities, and the medieval narrative of a child rejected by his parents and honoured by strangers was told and retold by itinerant performers — some of whom, the ebisu-kaki puppeteers of Nishinomiya, were themselves marginal people who carried the cult around the country and are credited with a role in the origins of bunraku puppet theatre. The god of the outsider was propagated by outsiders, which is not a coincidence.
Is the sea bream he holds always the same fish?
In orthodox depictions yes, and the substitutions are informative. Regional versions in areas where the red sea bream is not the prestige catch swap in other fish, and northern coastal shrines with whale traditions have their own emphases; some prints give him a lacquer bucket instead. The constant is not the species but the singular fish — one large specimen, caught by line, held rather than stacked. Compare the merchant iconography of Daikokuten, where the message is a heap of rice bales, and the difference between a deity of the lucky strike and a deity of stored wealth is doing exactly what the images say it is.