Tenjin

Tenjin is the deified spirit of Sugawara no Michizane, a real historical person, a scholar, poet and high official who lived in the ninth and early tenth centuries, and his case is the classic Japanese instance of a wronged and vengeful spirit pacified and raised into a beneficent god. Michizane was one of the most brilliant men of his age, a master of Chinese learning and poetry who rose to high office at the imperial court; but he fell victim to the intrigues of the rival Fujiwara family, was falsely accused, stripped of his rank, and sent into effective exile far from the capital at Dazaifu in Kyushu, where he died in bitterness and disgrace.

Michizane's cult was formally established at Kitano Tenmangu in Kyoto, founded in 947, some forty years after his death in exile in 903. In the intervening decades a chain of misfortunes, including the deaths of several courtiers implicated in his fall and a lightning strike on the imperial palace in 930 that killed and injured members of the court, were read as signs of his vengeful spirit, and the court responded in the traditional manner for pacifying an angry ghost, granting him a grand posthumous title and a shrine, which transformed a wronged official into Tenjin, god of thunder and, in time, of scholarship; Kitano Tenmangu remains the head shrine of some twelve thousand Tenjin and Tenmangu shrines across Japan.

After Michizane's death, the capital was struck by a series of disasters: his chief enemies died, the imperial palace was repeatedly hit by lightning and fire, and plague and drought followed. These calamities were widely interpreted as the work of Michizane's angry, unquiet spirit, an onryo or vengeful ghost, taking revenge for the injustice done to him. To appease and quiet this dangerous spirit, the court posthumously restored and even raised his rank, cleared his name, and enshrined him as a deity, building the great shrines of Kitano Tenmangu in Kyoto and Dazaifu Tenmangu near the place of his death. Pacified and honoured, the wronged official was transformed into the benevolent god Tenjin.

Because Michizane had in life been the supreme scholar of his generation, Tenjin became above all the god of scholarship, learning and calligraphy, and to this day he is the deity to whom Japanese students turn, praying at his shrines and hanging up votive tablets for success in their examinations. The plum blossom, which Michizane loved and wrote of, is his emblem. Tenjin's story is the outstanding example of the Japanese belief in goryo, the angry spirits of those who died wronged, and of the ritual means by which such a spirit could be transformed from a source of disaster into a protecting and beneficent god.