Pair of Kutani porcelain shishi guardian lions, one open-mouthed and one closed

Open and Shut: How to Read Japan's Guardian Pairs

By The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team, Tokyo. A treasure discoveries feature on Japan's guardian pairs: the Niō at the temple gate, the lion and the horned dog at the shrine, and the cousins they inspired.

Stand under the Great South Gate of Tōdai-ji in Nara and look up. Two wooden giants, each more than eight metres tall, glare down from either side. One shouts. The other has clamped his jaw shut. Most visitors read them as a matched pair of angry men. They are something stranger: a sentence in two syllables, the first and last sounds of a sacred alphabet, carved so that you walk between the beginning and the end of everything. Our argument is that Japan's guardians only make sense in pairs, and that the pair is a Japanese invention layered on borrowed lions. The court of the Heian period turned two identical lions into a lion and a horned dog; Buddhism gave the two mouths their meaning; and every later craft, from Okazaki stone to Kutani enamel, has spoken through that open and closed mouth. It is one of the oldest strands of the new Japonisme, still guarding the door.

Pair of bronze Nio guardian kings, Agyo with open mouth and Ungyo with closed mouth, Matsuhisa Sohrin school attribution — A pair of bronze Niō, about 61 cm each, with a Matsuhisa Sohrin school attribution. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** the figure on the left bares his teeth on the sound "a"; his partner seals his lips on "un".

At a glance
	Japan's guardian pairs
What they are	Paired guardians at gates and doors: Niō at temples, lion and komainu at shrines
The two mouths	Agyō, open, and ungyō, closed: the sounds "a" and "hūṃ"
Oldest Niō in Japan	Hōryū-ji middle gate, clay, 711
Most famous Niō	Tōdai-ji Great South Gate, 1203, carved in 69 days
Lion or komainu?	Classically, open mouth and no horn is the lion; closed mouth and one horn is the komainu
Where the record differs	Which master carved which Tōdai-ji giant
On our shelves	Bronze and wooden Niō, Edo komainu, Kutani and Bizen shishi, shachihoko

Two syllables: what "a-un" means

The pair begins with a word. A-un is the Japanese reading of the Sanskrit sounds a and hūṃ. In the old Siddham script used by esoteric Buddhism, "a" stands at the head of the twelve vowels and is spoken with the mouth open; "hūṃ" closes the series and is spoken with the mouth shut. Esoteric teaching made the two letters stand for the origin and the end of all things, and also for the awakened mind and nirvana.

That is why one guardian opens his mouth and the other closes it. The open figure is called agyō, "a form", and the closed one ungyō, "un form". Japanese dictionaries list the pair of mouths as a meaning of the word itself: a-un is both the alphabet's first and last letters and the open and shut faces of Niō and komainu. A third meaning is breathing out and breathing in.

The word left the temple long ago. Japanese speakers still say a-un no kokyū, "the breath of a-un", for two people who work together without a word, like partners who move as one; sumo wrestlers are said to match their a-un breathing at the start of a bout. The phrase was in print by 1805, in an illustrated novel describing a swordsman's perfect timing. A Noh play of about 1516 has mountain ascetics chanting the two letters with every breath in and out. Every pair of guardians carries that idea in stone or wood: two different beings, one breath. The Buddhism and Zen dictionary gathers the related terms.

Before the gate: the thunderbolt holder and the clay giants of 711

The Niō began as one figure, not two. Shukongōshin, "the deity who holds the vajra", is a protector who wields the thunderbolt weapon of Buddhism, and the paired gate guardians are said to have grown out of him. The most famous Shukongōshin in Japan stands behind the main image of the Hokke-dō hall at Tōdai-ji, a clay figure about 173 cm tall from the Nara period, already recorded there in the early ninth century.

He is a secret image. His shrine opens only once a year, on 16 December, the memorial day of the monk Rōben who founded the temple. His hair tie is missing an end, and the temple tells why: during the revolt of Taira no Masakado in 939 to 940, monks prayed before him for the rebel's defeat, and the tie became a giant bee that flew east and stung Masakado. The story is a legend. The open mouth, the raised vajra and the veins on the hands are fact, and they set the face of every Niō to come.

The oldest Niō at a gate stand at Hōryū-ji, in the middle gate of the western precinct. They were made in 711, of clay built over a wooden core. The open-mouthed agyō on the right was painted red, the closed-mouthed ungyō on the left black, and centuries of wind and rain have stripped most of the colour. In the sixteenth century the ungyō was rebuilt in wood below the head. The oldest pair in Japan is, in part, a patched one.

Sixty-nine days: the Niō of Tōdai-ji, 1203

In 1180 the Taira army burned the temples of Nara. The monk Chōgen led the rebuilding of Tōdai-ji with help from the court and from Minamoto no Yoritomo, and the Great South Gate was one of the last pieces. It went up in 1199 in a new style imported from Song China, with eighteen pillars more than nineteen metres long. Four years later the guardians were made for it.

The speed is the surprise. Work began on the 24th day of the 7th month of 1203. By the 7th day of the 8th month the open-mouthed figure was already standing in the gate. The pair was finished in about sixty-nine days and consecrated on the 3rd day of the 10th month. Each figure is just over 8.4 metres tall, joined from many blocks of Japanese cypress, a method that let the workshop carve both giants side by side at the same time.

No one knew the full team until the restoration of 1988 to 1993. Inside the figures, conservators found sutras and documents naming Chōgen and the sculptors, and a mass of ink inscriptions. They showed that four masters led the work: Unkei, Kaikei, Jōkaku and Unkei's eldest son Tankei. A copy of the Hōkyōin darani sutra, written at the east end of the gate on the 8th day of the 8th month, had been nailed inside the chest of the closed-mouthed figure. The timber came from Yamaguchi, as the old records said. Weighed during the repair, the agyō came to about 6.7 tonnes and the ungyō about 6.9.

The pair also breaks two rules. Most Niō face straight out from the gate, but these two face each other across the passage. And the usual order is reversed: seen from the front, the agyō stands on the left and the ungyō on the right. Nobody has settled why. Paused for now as a reference page, the Tōdai-ji and the Great Buddha page sets the gate in the wider temple.

A small bronze carries the same tension indoors. A bronze Niō pair cast after Takamura Kōun, 56 to 56.5 cm, in a Kodansha-certified Shōwa edition shows how a modern master read the Kamakura giants; our feature on Japan's bronze statues follows Kōun's other work.

The lions behind the giants: Song stone at Tōdai-ji

Walk through the Great South Gate and turn round. Tucked behind the giants on the north side stand two stone lions, and most visitors never see them. They were carved in 1196 by four Song Chinese stonemasons led by a man recorded as Rokurō. The masons found Japanese stone too hard to work and had stone shipped from China.

"Pass through the Great South Gate and they stand just to the north. Beside a gate where the powerful agyō and ungyō look down, I think many people miss them."
Tsujio Eiichi, director, Institute of Regional History, Folklore and Archaeology, 2019 (our translation)

They break the Japanese pattern in the most instructive way. The two are almost the same shape. Both open their mouths and noses in a threat; neither takes the a-un form. The eastern lion is about 180 cm tall and carved as male; the western one is about 160 cm, chest thrust out on stiff front legs. They show what a guardian pair looked like before Japan made it a conversation.

The carvers are thought to have come with Chen Heqing, the Song engineer who repaired the Great Buddha, and may be the circle of Ii Yukisue, a mason from Ningbo who stayed in Japan, worked on the temple's stone figures and died in 1260. His descendants kept carving around Nara for generations. A Sino-Tibetan pair of gilt bronze lions, 54.5 kg for the two, shows the mainland family these masons came from.

A lion and a dog: how the Heian court made the pair

When Buddhism reached Japan in the sixth century, it came with images, and the images came with lions. Two lions sat before the Buddha to guard him. Until the Nara period the pair was simply two lions. Then, early in the Heian period, the court changed one of them. The new set paired an open-mouthed lion, shishi, with a closed-mouthed beast that wore a single horn on its head: the komainu.

The name puzzled people even then. Komainu can be read as "dog of Koma", the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, and some explained it as a dog from the peninsula; others tied it to the Hayato people of southern Kyushu, who guarded the emperor by imitating the bark of dogs. The deeper origin is the lion pair before the Buddha. Many shrines and readers today call both animals komainu, and that usage is not wrong. Strictly, though, the classic pair is a lion and a komainu.

At court they had a practical job. The Engishiki, a Heian code of court procedure, set their colours, forms and places. A lion and a komainu sat before the curtained dais of the emperor and empress to guard their persons, and also served as weights that kept the hanging blinds and screens from lifting in the wind. Small ones in bronze or ceramic doubled as incense burners. Shrines borrowed them to guard the gods, and at first kept them out of sight, inside the doors of the main hall.

"Lions and komainu are told apart by whether the mouth is open or closed and whether there is a horn. This figure bears a single horn on its head and keeps its mouth closed, which is how we know it is a komainu."
Naitō Wataru, curator, Nara National Museum, 2022 (our translation)

Over the centuries the guardians walked out of the building: from the inner sanctuary to the veranda, down to the front of the hall, then the worship hall, the approach and finally the torii gate. The further out they stood, the earlier they could stop trouble. On the way the horn faded, and many later komainu have none at all. Couples and cubs crept in too, for harmony in marriage and many descendants. The Nara National Museum's early Kamakura komainu, 66.2 cm in painted wood, has lost its partner: one half of a sentence, still recognisable by its horn.

Edo period carved wood komainu guardian pair, one open-mouthed and one closed, with traces of polychrome — An Edo-period pair of carved wooden komainu with traces of the colour they once wore. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** one mouth is open, one shut; wood guardians like these were made to sit under a roof, not in the rain.

One horn, two mouths: how to read a pair

A guardian pair can be read in about ten seconds once you know where to look. Start with the mouths, then the head, then the paws. The rules below are the classic ones; regional carvers and later workshops broke every one of them, so treat the table as a first reading, not a verdict.

Reading a guardian pair
Look at	Japanese classic	Chinese convention	What it tells you
Mouths	One open, one closed	Both usually open	An a-un pair is Japanese in thought
Horn	On the closed-mouthed komainu	Not a marker	A horn marks the komainu, though many lost it
Sides	Viewer's right open lion, left closed komainu	Male on one side, female on the other	Many sites reverse it; Tōdai-ji's Niō do
Paws	Ball or cub later and optional	Male: ball under right paw; female: cub	Ball and cub are a mainland import
Sex	Not part of the classic pair	Male and female	Male and female readings in Japan are later and popular
Material	Wood indoors; stone outdoors	Stone	Wood suggests a figure made to sit under a roof

The paws need a word. In China, from the Han dynasty onward, stone lions guarded temples, tombs and palaces. The male rests his right paw on a brocaded ball, read as the world or the unity of the empire, and the female plays with a cub. Foreigners in China later called them "Fu dogs", perhaps from "fo" for Buddha or "fu" for palace, though the Chinese simply call them lions. A correction to the common story: the "foo dog" of the antique trade is a lion, and a Japanese komainu is not a Chinese one with a new name. It is half of a pair that China never made.

Our own shelves show the range. A bronze komainu pair of about 20 cm, attributed to the late Edo to Taishō years rests a paw on jewel balls, and a large late Edo pair in wood, 53 cm keeps the oversized heads of provincial shrine carving. For classic a-un in porcelain, a celadon pair of qilin, 48 cm shows a different beast taking the same posts.

Sandals for a giant: the straw at Sensō-ji

At Sensō-ji in Asakusa, the Niō gate is now called the Hōzōmon, the treasure gate. A gate here is said to go back to 942, when a provincial governor built one in thanks for his appointment. The gate given by the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1649 stood until 1945, when the war took it; the present gate keeps the Niō in its outer bays.

On its back hang giant straw sandals, 4.5 metres tall and 1.5 metres wide. They weigh about 500 kg, and 2,500 kg of rice straw went into them. The idea is simple and very funny: a demon who sees sandals that size will realise how big the guardian must be, and run. Volunteers from Murayama, in Yamagata Prefecture, have made and given the sandals since 1941; the latest pair arrived in October 2018, the eighth.

The custom spells out what the Niō are for. They are not decoration and not portraits. They are a warning, and a temple will happily add a joke to make the warning larger. Our reading of Tokyo walks passes the gate.

One design on every approach: the Okazaki komainu

Ask a shrine fan which komainu they see most and the answer comes with a sigh. A single design, born in the stonemasons' town of Okazaki in Aichi during the Taishō period, now stands at shrines across Japan. It is called the Okazaki modern type, a modern rearrangement of the guardians once kept inside shrine halls, and in its way a masterpiece of design. Fans have given it weary nicknames, because they meet it everywhere.

Its success was a choice. The stonemason said to have created it, the sixth Sakai Magobei, active in the Meiji and Taishō years, showed his method openly to the other masons of Okazaki, and the design spread across the country with startling speed. An early work of his from 1904 is still squat and only hints at the type; by 1917 it is there. Okazaki's masons were the same workshops that sent the stone Ninomiya Kinjirō to every school ground, as our bronze statues feature tells.

The design has a newer rival. Today most new komainu set up in Japan are cut in China, from Chinese stone by Chinese masons, and many of them copy the Okazaki type. The pair is still the rule even when the carving travels.

Not every regional pair is stone. Bizen, the unglazed stoneware of Okayama, made komainu as well: small ones for the inner sanctuary from the 1600s, and large approach guardians from the early nineteenth century. Fired from moulds, Bizen pairs look alike, with drooping ears and a straight candle-shaped tail, and about half the closed-mouthed ones have a horn. Read our Bizen ware guide for the clay.

Red guardians in enamel: Kutani and Bizen shishi

Kutani porcelain began in the 1650s in the village of Kutani in Kaga, at the order of the first lord of the Daishōji domain, who sent a retainer to learn the craft in Arita. From the start it was made for overglaze colour: green, yellow, red, purple and deep blue, the five colours of Kutani. The first kilns closed, and about a century later the Kaga domain revived the ware in Kanazawa at the Kasugayama kiln, with the Kyoto potter Aoki Mokubei as adviser. In the Meiji period, potters such as Kutani Shōza sent large quantities abroad.

The red came from the revival. Kasugayama's red-painted wares, and the fine red line work later perfected at the Miyamotoya kiln, became the root of modern Kutani red. On a guardian lion that red reads as fire. Kutani shishi stand on brocade balls and cushions, manes curling in gold; many sit alone, but a pair with one open and one closed mouth keeps the old rule.

Pair of Kutani porcelain shishi guardian lions, one open-mouthed and one closed, polychrome overglaze — A pair of Kutani shishi, 28 cm, with one open and one closed mouth. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** blues, creams and gold pool in the mane; the pair is the a-un of the temple gate made in porcelain.

The shelf shows the variety. A Kutani lion balanced on a jewel ball, 30 cm, is the tama-nori type; a Kutani lion gripping the sacred jewel on a brocade cushion, 37 cm, is heavier in red. Bizen answers in bare clay: a Bizen tama-nori shishi, 36.5 cm with its box, and a leaping-lion incense burner attributed to Nishimura Harusei, the Kyoto-born potter who lived from 1886 to 1953. Our Kutani guide covers the kilns. Material can change the voice too: a pair of jadeite shishi, 18 kg, comes with laboratory certificates.

Cousins of the pair: wolves, shisa and golden fish

Once Japan learned to think in guardian pairs, it put other animals on the posts. At Mitsumine Shrine in the mountains of Chichibu, the guardians are wolves. The shrine tells that a wolf guided the prince Yamato Takeru up the mountain, and it is honoured as a divine messenger. From 1720 a monk named Nikkō Hōin spread devotion to the "honourable dogs" far beyond the mountain.

In Okinawa the pair is the shisa, a lion said to have come from China in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, set on roofs, gates and village entrances. Accounts differ on how to read it. A prefectural guide for children says the closed mouth is female and the open one male. The keepers of Shuri Castle answer that the mouths have nothing to do with sex: open is "a", the beginning, closed is "un", the end, and the castle's shisa follow the a-un form. We print both.

The grandest pair sits on a roof. Nagoya Castle's golden shachihoko, dragon-headed fish said to guard against fire, were set on the keep in 1612. The male faces north and is taller; the female on the south carries more golden scales. Whenever the domain ran short of money, the gold was recast, three times before the Meiji era. The originals burned in an air raid in May 1945. The second pair stands 2.621 and 2.579 metres, in 18-carat gold plate 0.15 mm thick. A copper shachihoko pair on one plinth, 6 cm high, and a late twentieth-century bronze pair bring the roofline to a desk.

Vintage Japanese copper shachihoko pair facing each other on a shared plinth — A copper shachihoko pair on a shared plinth, about 6 cm high. Japonista photograph. **Look closer:** the two fish face inward, tails raised, like the pair on a castle keep.

Bringing a pair home: what to check

A guardian pair is one object in two parts. The first question is whether the two belong together: same material, same hand, same base, matching wear. A pair assembled from two singles can be honest, but it should be described that way. The second is the mouths. If both are open, the figures may be Chinese, a single lion's twin, or a pair made outside the a-un habit; none of that is a fault, but it changes the reading.

Wood needs a roof. Wooden guardians were made to sit inside halls, so keep them away from damp and direct sun, and dust them gently. Stone and bronze can be heavy enough to need two people. Display pairs as they were meant to stand, facing out or turned slightly toward each other, with the open mouth on the viewer's right unless the pair itself says otherwise.

For Niō, the shelf runs from the intimate to the commanding: a hinoki pair of 20 cm for a home altar, a late Edo to early Meiji wooden pair, 29 cm, a bronze pair of 32 cm each, a bronze pair of 61 cm with a Matsuhisa Sohrin school attribution, and a Shōwa wooden pair of 69 cm, gilt on black.

Opinion: the mass-made komainu deserves respect

This section is opinion, labelled as such. Shrine enthusiasts are hard on the Okazaki modern type and harder on the Chinese-cut pairs now replacing it. Their case is strong. A design repeated thousands of times loses the local hand that made older komainu so varied, and a pair ordered from abroad breaks the link between a shrine and the masons of its own region. Collectors who prize Edo provincial carving have good reason to feel that something was lost.

We see it differently. The Okazaki type spread because a master gave his method away, and the result put a guardian pair at the door of shrines that could never have afforded a sculptor. That is generosity, not decline. The pair still opens and closes its mouth, and the a-un idea survives the change of hands. Readers who mourn the variety have a point; so does the village that finally got its guardians.

Timeline

Japan's guardian pairs, sixth century to 2018
Year	Event
6th century	Buddhism reaches Japan; lion pairs come with the images
711	Clay Niō made for the middle gate of Hōryū-ji
Early 800s	Shukongōshin recorded in the Hokke-dō at Tōdai-ji
Early Heian	Court pairs a lion with a horned komainu
1196	Song masons carve the stone lions of Tōdai-ji
1203	Tōdai-ji Niō carved in about 69 days
1612	Golden shachihoko set on Nagoya Castle
1649	Iemitsu's Niō gate completed at Sensō-ji
1650s	Kutani porcelain begins in Kaga
1720	Wolf devotion spreads from Mitsumine
Taishō	Okazaki modern komainu type emerges
1941	First giant sandals from Murayama for Sensō-ji
1945	Sensō-ji's Iemitsu gate and Nagoya's shachihoko lost in the war
1988–1993	Tōdai-ji Niō dismantled and repaired; four masters named
2018	Eighth pair of giant sandals given to Sensō-ji

Where the record differs

Guardians are meant to be certain. The history around them is less so. Where accounts differ, we print both.

Two readings, one pair
Question	One version	The other	Why they differ
Who carved which Tōdai-ji Niō	Agyō by Unkei and Kaikei; ungyō by Jōkaku and Tankei	The division of work is still unclear	Inscriptions name all four but not every task
Why the Tōdai-ji sides are reversed	Several theories	No agreed answer	No document explains it
Shisa mouths	Open is male, closed is female	Open is "a", closed is "un"; no sex	Popular custom against the castle's own records
Sensō-ji sandals	Eighth pair, 2018	Seventh pair, 2008	An older guide not yet updated
Makers of the stone lions	Rokurō and three Song masons	The circle of Ii Yukisue	Possibly the same men under different names

Our reading: one breath in two bodies

The guardians are usually explained one figure at a time: a fierce king, a lion, a dog. The record points to something better. In Japan the unit is the pair, and the pair is a dialogue. The Heian court broke the symmetry of the mainland lions and gave one of them a horn and a shut mouth. Buddhism gave the two mouths a meaning, the first and last sounds. The Kamakura carvers turned the two giants to face each other. Even the jokes, from the sandals of Asakusa to the scales of Nagoya, work by contrast within a pair.

That is why a single guardian always looks a little lonely, like the museum's komainu that lost its lion, and why reading a pair correctly is the collector's first pleasure. Look at the mouths, look for the horn, check that the two belong together. Then stand between them, as visitors to Tōdai-ji have done for eight centuries, and walk from "a" to "un". That is our reading.

Answered plainly

What do the open and closed mouths mean?

They form "a-un": the first and last sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet, spoken with the mouth open and closed. Together they stand for the beginning and end of all things.

What is the difference between Niō and komainu?

Niō are muscular human guardians at Buddhist temple gates. Komainu are lion-like beasts, usually at Shinto shrines, classically paired with a lion.

How can I tell a lion from a komainu?

Classically the lion has an open mouth and no horn; the komainu has a closed mouth and a single horn. Many later pairs have lost the horn.

Where are the oldest Niō in Japan?

At the middle gate of Hōryū-ji in Nara, made of clay in 711. The most famous pair stands in Tōdai-ji's Great South Gate, carved in 1203.

Are "foo dogs" Japanese?

No. "Foo dog" is a foreign name for Chinese guardian lions. Japanese komainu grew from the same lions but became an a-un pair of lion and horned beast.

References

Back to blog

Item added to your cart

How do you collect?

Membership is complimentary

5% towards your first order

One Desk in Tokyo, acting on your behalf

Name a piece and we bring it home