The well had a god. Not the water, and not a spirit living in the water — the well itself, as a made thing, had a resident.
The word is i no kami, written 井神 or 井の神: i, a well, and kami. A Japanese dictionary of folklore carries it as a head of its own and records shrines named for it — a shrine in Ōmi called the Well Deity, with rice-planting offerings laid out twenty-one trays at a time; a shrine in Tōtōmi where a well in the middle of a field gives cold water and was worshipped as the well god, and which appears in a ninth-century court history receiving a rank in 866.
At one group of shrines in Izumi the offices were named for the thing: the senior priest was called the director of the well and the junior the keeper of the well.
So this is not folk marginalia. A well could be the reason a shrine existed, and the staff could be titled after it.
One point of order, because it affects how you will find this subject.
The graph is 井, which is read i. The reading ki no kami appears in some places for the well god, and this note has not been able to establish it from an original. What has been verified is the form 井神, i-no-kami. Anyone searching should expect both spellings to turn up and should not assume they are two different deities on the strength of the romanisation alone.
The custom that gives this article its reason is about ending a well rather than using one.
When a well was filled in, the dictionary records, there was a practice of standing a green bamboo upright in the centre of the well and burying it in place.
And it gives the explanation in one clause: this becomes the passage of the well god.
Stop on what that implies. Filling a well is not disposal. It is enclosing something that is still there and will still need to come and go, and the bamboo is left as the route. A hollow stem is set vertically through the fill so that the occupant is sealed in but not shut in.
I do not know a neater example of the whole logic in the household-deity material. The god is not relocated, not thanked off, not dismissed. The god is left with a corridor.
The same entry records a test, performed at the moment of filling, to find out in advance whether the well will give trouble afterwards.
You drop a single bird’s feather from the centre of the well. If it falls straight down, the well will not curse you. If it strikes the sides on the way and does not come down vertically, it will curse you later.
That is a measurement with a stated reading, taken at the one moment when the answer still matters, and it tells you what the anxiety actually was. Not the water. Not the digging. The anxiety was about closing it.
Our note on the privy god deals with the other fixture of a Japanese house that was held to have a resident, and the two have the same shape: a small, necessary, slightly unclean piece of built equipment, with something in it, and rules about how to behave at it.
It is worth asking why this particular fixture collected a deity when a stream or a rain barrel did not.
Three features of a well distinguish it. It is vertical, and so it is an opening downward in a way nothing else about a house is — the notes here on the demon hall and on the living hell deal with other places where the ground was held to be open. It is made, so somebody is responsible for its existence in a way nobody is responsible for a river. And it is permanent in the wrong direction: you can abandon a field or pull down a shed, but a hole that has been dug cannot be un-dug, only filled.
Put those together and the rules follow almost mechanically. A made opening downward that cannot be removed will acquire a resident, an etiquette, and a procedure for the day you have to close it.
The dictionary also records, from the Bōsō peninsula, a swearing custom that borrows the well’s vocabulary without involving an actual well.
Two people make a ring with thumb and forefinger. Something small — a twig, a chip of stone, a coin, or spittle — is dropped through the ring while the words shallow well, shallow well are said. Whoever breaks the oath is told to go and fetch the dropped thing up from the bottom.
There is no well. The ring of two fingers is the well, and the depth is entirely notional, and the penalty is an impossible retrieval from a place that does not exist.
That is a good indication of how far the idea travelled. The well is not only a thing in the yard; it is a figure for a depth you cannot get back out of, available for use in an argument between two people standing in a field.
The dictionary’s neighbouring entries show the other end of the relationship, where the question is whether a well may exist at all.
It has a head for villages without wells, and the explanations given are prohibitions rather than geology. One shrine’s precepts forbid digging a well outright. At one place near a great shrine the ground has never been dug, and it is said that digging brings disaster. One village uses a shrine’s ablution water for its daily needs instead.
And it has a head for the god who dislikes wells, where the reason usually given is startling in its plainness: the deity fell into a well, through his own fault.
A god with an accident in his past, and a prohibition descended from it. That is a long way from a nature spirit of the waters.
The practical half of the dictionary’s well material is divination, and it is worth including because it shows the stakes.
In districts where wells were hard to sink and expensive, people tried to establish in advance whether there was water: an upturned rice bowl left overnight and examined for dew inside; a bowl of water set on the ground to see whether the stars were reflected in it; cormorant feathers spread on the ground and the place chosen where white dew settled.
The dictionary notes that the overnight-bowl method was also practised in Korea, citing a Korean literary collection.
A well was a capital project with a failure rate. That is the setting for everything above — the god, the corridor, the feather and the prohibitions all belong to a technology that cost a great deal, could not be moved once made, and could not be safely undone.
People set down that something had happened at a well, or because of one, or when one was closed. Those records exist in some number, including ones from within living memory; they are short, they give a place and often a year, and they record the event rather than the person.
Five records of that kind became the five stories in There Is No Column For It. The book is at /books/there-is-no-column-for-it/.
The readings in “The Bamboo”, “The Feather” and “Finding Water, and Not Finding It” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.