The Catfish Prints of 1855 Carried More Than One Earthquake Story.
On this page
The ground shifted in Edo in 1855, and printed catfish quickly became visible carriers of the event's imagery. Namazu-e were color prints centered on the catfish believed to cause earthquakes, generally published after the Ansei Edo earthquake. The surviving record supports that basic setting, but it does not reduce every print to one message. A catfish could be the stated cause of disaster while the surrounding figures altered the scene's meaning. The category is therefore less a single emblem than a field of related images, joined by a central creature and separated by the people, deities, objects, and other figures placed beside it.
That distinction matters before an interpretative story gets too tidy. The National Diet Library Namazu-e Image Bank identifies anthropomorphized fish alongside deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and other figures. Those elements are documented in the collection; the exact motive of a particular maker or viewer is not supplied by this record. Yet their presence means the appearance of the catfish did not exhaust the visual field. The fish remains central, but it visibly shares each composition with figures and objects that prevent the category from becoming a single, fixed picture.
Another boundary runs through the word belief. The image bank describes a catfish believed to cause earthquakes, while a scholarly study traces catfish symbolism across a broader religious geography. These are documented lines of evidence, but they do not authorize a claim that every 1855 image delivered one settled religious lesson. Hundreds of varieties followed the earthquake, according to that study. Variety is not a blank check for unlimited interpretation; it is a reason to keep the images close to their visible company and to resist turning the whole group into one uniform response.
Edo in 1855 and the Catfish at the Center
Within this post-earthquake print world, the catfish was not a background motif. It centered a form that repeatedly gave an earthquake a body: a fish large enough, in pictorial terms, to appear with deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and unnamed companions. The image-bank grouping establishes those kinds of figures in the collection, not a single ordered cast or plot. Such scenes place the animal among forces and objects rather than isolating it as a natural specimen. The shared center holds the category together even as the company around the fish changes across the surviving images.
The catfish's central place did not make the prints visually narrow. The scholarly study records hundreds of varieties after 1855. It also traces catfish symbolism across a broader religious geography rather than treating the prints as an isolated belief. Against that evidence, a namazu-e need not be read as a direct illustration of one earthquake explanation. Its fish belongs to a repeated visual category, while the surrounding arrangement differs from print to print. The documentation supplies a shared figure and a varied corpus; it does not assign a universal intention to the artists or public.
Keystones, gourds, deities, workers, and the catfish appear in the image bank's account of the collection. The verified finding does not supply a complete role for each figure in every print. It instead identifies a recurring visual field in which objects and characters meet an anthropomorphized earthquake-causing animal. That limit is useful. A reader can recognize that the prints gather more than one kind of figure without deciding, from the presence of a keystone or a worker alone, that an individual scene has been fully decoded. The catfish is the center of attention, not a shortcut past the rest of the image.
The distinction between verified record and interpretation can travel beyond Edo. Mari Lwyd's Doorstep Rhyme Is Recorded, but Its Ancient Origin Is Not. offers a separate comparison without making its history evidence for namazu-e. Here, the prints provide an identified post-earthquake form, a catfish at its center, and a visible range of companions. They do not provide permission to flatten that range into an all-purpose explanation before an individual image has been considered. The point is not that the two traditions share a history, only that their titles invite care with the boundary between record and interpretation.
Another internal path leads through Sagnagrunnur Across Iceland's Printed Legend Landscape, a separate setting that belongs beside, not inside, Edo's print world. The immediate question here is narrower: who appears around the earthquake catfish, and what changes when the fish meets them? Deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and other figures already make the answer plural. The next scenes can follow those companions without pretending that the catfish speaks alone. Their presence keeps the central animal in company, where the surviving prints place it.
Keystones, Gourds, Workers, and an Anthropomorphized Fish
The National Diet Library Namazu-e Image Bank describes namazu-e as color prints centered on a catfish believed to cause earthquakes, generally published after the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake. That description supplies a starting point, but its pictured world is not limited to a single animal standing alone for a single explanation. The collection includes an anthropomorphized fish alongside deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and other figures. Each addition changes the visual field: the catfish remains central, while the image makes room for several presences around it.
A catfish given a human-like form is already more than an undifferentiated force under the ground. The image bank’s examples place that figure in company. Deities, workers, keystones, and gourds belong to the documented vocabulary of the collection, rather than to an invented modern gloss placed over it. Their appearance prevents the scene from shrinking to one culprit and one event. The prints could hold the earthquake catfish at their center while also showing a surrounding cast whose objects and bodies ask the eye to move beyond the fish itself.
The keystone is especially useful as a visual counterweight, because it appears among the figures and objects documented by the National Diet Library. It does not erase the catfish from the print’s premise; it shares the image with it. A gourd likewise enters the same visual vocabulary without requiring a single fixed meaning from every example. Beside an anthropomorphized fish, these objects make the page look populated and arranged, not reduced to a bare emblem. The catfish is visible within a set of relations rather than isolated as the only thing worth seeing.
Workers make that surrounding field human as well as symbolic. The National Diet Library collection shows them among the figures connected with namazu-e, alongside deities and the fish. No one figure has to carry the whole visual burden. A worker is not a replacement culprit, and a deity is not a simple caption for the catfish; the documented images place unlike figures near one another. That proximity gives the prints a crowded vocabulary, where an earthquake image may direct attention toward labor, divine figures, objects, and a fish with a face or body treated as humanlike.
Such variety also makes it risky to flatten namazu-e into a single response preserved in a single image. The image bank presents color prints with recurring catfish-centered material, yet the catalogued visual company includes more than one kind of figure and more than one kind of object. Readers approaching printed folklore through Mari Lwyd's Doorstep Rhyme Is Recorded, but Its Ancient Origin Is Not. may recognize the value of staying close to what a surviving form actually shows before assigning it a larger, uniform story.
Namazu-e therefore appears here as a visual assemblage: an anthropomorphized catfish, deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and further figures held within color prints published after the 1855 earthquake. That is a narrower observation than a universal explanation, but it is enough to change the question. The catfish does not occupy an empty page. For another view of printed legend material distributed across a landscape, see Sagnagrunnur Across Iceland's Printed Legend Landscape. In a named earthquake print, the same crowded company makes the image a place where several figures appear at once.
Earthquake Catfish Investigation and the Ansei 2 Date
The National Diet Library catalog offers a sharply bounded point of reference: an Internet-accessible multicolor woodblock item called Earthquake Catfish Investigation. Its listing dates the item to the second day of the tenth month of Ansei 2 and places it in the University of Tokyo Ishimoto disaster collection. Those details identify an object, a date as catalogued, and a holding collection. They do not by themselves tell a complete story about its maker, its first reader, or the particular circumstances of its circulation. The entry is useful precisely because its limits remain visible beside its specificity.
The Ansei 2 date needs the same restraint. The catalog supplies a date in its own stated form, and this section does not convert it into a different calendar or attach an unlisted hour, location, or sequence of events. It anchors the title to a known catalog description rather than to an imagined scene. A reader may notice that a dated print carries more immediate documentary weight than a loose allusion, yet the entry does not settle every question raised by that title. It confirms the existence of this catalogued item in the named collection, not the full range of meanings others may draw from it.
Calling the item a multicolor woodblock work also says less than it may seem to say. The catalog’s format description supports that material classification; it does not authorize a reconstruction of every color, composition, or surviving impression. No translation of an inscription is supplied in the frozen finding, and no individual figure is identified there. The article therefore keeps the object at the scale the entry provides: a named print, catalogued by date and format. Its presence gives the subject a documentary anchor without turning one listing into a complete guide to namazu-e imagery, audiences, or intention.
The University of Tokyo Ishimoto disaster collection is part of the catalog description, a location of custody rather than a biographical claim about the print. The listing names no artist, publisher, seller, or original owner, and it sets out no chain of handling before the collection. This prevents the collection name from doing more work than the entry permits. Yet it distinguishes the object from an unlocated reproduction or unsupported online image. Readers interested in other legend traditions may also consult Mari Lwyd's Doorstep Rhyme Is Recorded, but Its Ancient Origin Is Not. and Sagnagrunnur Across Iceland's Printed Legend Landscape.
The title Earthquake Catfish Investigation provides an unusually direct verbal anchor, but even that wording deserves careful handling. It is the catalogued English title supplied by the National Diet Library entry; the frozen material gives no longer transcription, quotation, or explanation of its phrasing. The title plainly joins an earthquake and a catfish in the catalogue’s presentation, while leaving the article without grounds to assign a single message to the print. Its force lies in being an identified object with a dated listing, not in supplying an all-purpose answer about the beliefs or arguments surrounding every catfish print of 1855.
One object cannot stand for an entire print culture, and the catalog itself does not ask it to. Its narrow facts are more modest: online access, a multicolor woodblock format, the stated Ansei 2 date, the title, and the University of Tokyo Ishimoto disaster collection. Those facts allow a distinction between a documented print and broader commentary about the period. They also leave room for later sections to discuss patterns only where other supplied material addresses them. The subject is not reduced by that boundary; the boundary keeps the object before the reader separate from the larger questions gathered around it.
Securely, then, the catalog places before the reader a specific Internet-accessible multicolor woodblock item, titled Earthquake Catfish Investigation, dated to the second day of the tenth month of Ansei 2, and held in the University of Tokyo Ishimoto disaster collection. That gives the catfish-print story a particular documentary object without assigning it an unverified author, interpretation, or social effect. From this point, the inquiry widens by a different measure: which functions namazu-e served after disaster when broader evidence is brought alongside this one catalogued print.
Punishing the Catfish While Rebuilding Edo
Namazu-e began from a startling visual premise: the catfish was believed to cause earthquakes. The National Diet Library Namazu-e Image Bank defines them as color prints centered on that animal and generally published after the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake. Its collection includes anthropomorphized fish alongside deities, workers, keystones, gourds, and other figures. Those elements do not yield a single prescribed message. They show a pictured world able to gather damage, authority, labor, and comic confrontation around the same creature. The catfish could be blamed, handled, and placed among people and objects with different stakes.
Scale helps explain why one meaning is too narrow. The Nichibunken Conduits of Power research paper says that hundreds of varieties followed the 1855 earthquake and traces the catfish symbol through a broader religious geography. A large body of prints permits repetition without requiring sameness. Images sharing a catfish could set it among different figures or pressures while retaining the earthquake at their center. The animal was not merely a fixed emblem carried unchanged from one sheet to the next. It supplied a common figure through which several concerns could enter view without being reduced to one lesson.
The Nichibunken popular culture research series identifies several functions and themes: recording destruction and survivor life, easing fear as talismans, depicting reconstruction, punishing the catfish, criticizing beneficiaries, and hoping for social reform. These functions sit beside one another rather than forming a tidy progression. Destruction and survivor life concern immediate disruption; talismanic relief concerns fear; reconstruction directs attention toward what follows. Punishment, criticism, and social hope add further registers. The range makes the catfish less a single answer to disaster than a shared figure through which divergent responses could coexist.
Fear did not have to disappear before an image carried another purpose. The research series includes both talismanic relief and depictions of destruction and survivor life, placing comfort beside the conditions that made comfort necessary. That pairing matters because it leaves room for a print to acknowledge disruption without presenting relief as a final resolution. For a nearby example of a tradition whose recorded form and claimed antiquity are held apart, see Mari Lwyd's Doorstep Rhyme Is Recorded, but Its Ancient Origin Is Not.
Reconstruction also does not sit outside satire in this material. The Nichibunken popular culture research series includes depictions of reconstruction alongside criticism of beneficiaries and hopes for social reform. None of those listed themes requires the others to vanish. Rebuilding could be pictured while questions about advantage remained present, and a catfish could receive punishment while social hope stayed in the frame. Another printed-legend context appears in Sagnagrunnur Across Iceland's Printed Legend Landscape, where the printed setting is likewise part of the subject rather than a neutral container.
Punishment gives the catfish world a sharp comic edge, but the documented range does not make punishment its sole purpose. The popular culture research series explicitly includes punishing the catfish among its themes, together with criticism of beneficiaries and hopes for social reform. Those listed concerns do not identify a single audience response or a single political program. They mark a field in which blame, relief, rebuilding, and criticism could appear around the same earthquake figure. The catfish could therefore be a culprit and a target without exhausting the meanings assigned to it.
Across this documented range, the catfish remains surrounded by destruction, survivor life, talismanic relief, rebuilding, beneficiaries, and hopes for social reform. The coexistence of these responses does not require them to agree. A print world may punish the creature associated with upheaval while also making space for fear, reconstruction, and dissatisfaction with who gains afterward. Preserving that plurality keeps the 1855 catfish from becoming a mere mascot of one emotion or one policy. On the page, punishment shares the scene with rebuilding, and neither one erases the other.