Fires rage and the earth shakes while a tired-looking Ebisu--filling in for the Kashima Deity who is out of town to attend a meeting in Izumo--dozes against the Kaname-ishi 要石. And what else is going on? For one thing, money (large gold coins) is falling from the burning city--a point that we will soon examine in the main text.

The strange looking guy on the left is the thunder deity, a close associate of the Kashima deity. What is the thunder deity doing? He seems to be engaging in a peculiar pastime of the less sophisticated Edoites--extreme farting, or "thunder farting." The object was make more noise than your opponents. This activity made its debut in 1774 at the Ryôgoku 両国 Bridge, a major site of popular culture displays in Edo--at least according to the scholar Hiraga Gennai 平賀源内 in his learned treatise Hôhiron 放屁論 (On farting). What might look like like excrement are actually small drums, which emphasize the "thunder" element. (For clarifying these points I am indebted to the analysis of Wakamizu Suguru 若水俊, Namazu wa odoru: Edo no namazu-e omoshiro bunseki  鯰は踊る--江戸の鯰絵面白分析 [Namazu dance: a distinctive analysis of namazu-e], [Bungeisha, 2003], pp. 70-73).

The guy on horseback at right is the Kashima deity, rushing back from his meeting (with other major deities--they have a convention every year) in Izumo. So, the Kashima deity is out of town, his temporary replacement, the likeable but less diligent deity Ebisu, is sleeping on the job, and the thunder deity, who should be working, is off at the Ryôgoku Bridge literally farting around. And these incompetent deities have allowed a major disaster to unfold in the form of a fire-ravaged, post-earthquake Edo.

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