The great stone lion of Tomori

photo by Kugel~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 4.0

photo by Fred Cherrygarden · CC BY-SA 4.0

It was put there in 1689 so that the village would stop burning, and the fires stopped.

It is one metre seventy-five long and one metre forty-one high: the largest and oldest village shisa in the prefecture, and it stares fixedly at Mount Yaese. On its back it has scars as thick as stars: they are the bullet holes of 1945. Its face, though, is smiling. Below it you can see the fields, the schools and the sea.

A stone shisa erected in 1689 on the Jiri-gusuku rise, in the village of Tomori. The kingdom's chronicle relates that Tomori was constantly burning, and that a geomancer from the Kumemura neighbourhood identified the cause as Mount Yaese, ‘mountain of fire’, prescribing a stone lion facing it to send the fire back. The town of Yaese keeps eighteen village lions in nine hamlets: this is the first of the line.

ℹ️ Free, open access at any hour, with a car park. About twenty-five minutes by car from the Naha interchange; by bus, line 34 or 36 to the Tomori bus stop, ten minutes on foot.

🚉 富盛 · 9 min walk

Sources: town.yaese.lg.jp · town.yaese.lg.jp · okinawastory.jp

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