We moor in front of the great temple, the Miojinja. Its great paved avenue slopes to the water's edge, where boats are also moored at steps of stone; and looking up the broad approach, one sees a grand stone torii, and colossal stone lanterns, and two magnificent sculptured lions, karashishi, seated upon lofty pedestals, and looking down upon the people from a height of fifteen feet or more.
Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan
I.
Every first generation Pokédex entry on Growlithe emphasizes Growlithe as a guardian. Red and Blue: “Very protective of its territory. It will bark and bite to repel intruders from its space.” Yellow: “A Pokémon with a friendly nature. However, it will bark fiercely at anything invading its territory.” Pokémon Stadium: “Friendly and loyal, but also jealously protective of its territory. Carelessly approaching it may result in a bite.”
Growlithe serves as the Pokémon world’s police dog analogue, accompanying Officer Jennys in the anime and Police Officers — who seem rather unreasonably willing to abandon their patrols and engage in Pokémon battles while on duty — in the games. (For presumably budgetary reasons, all the police officers in the Pokémon anime share the same design, voice and even name. The in-universe explanation for this fact? The entire world’s police force consists of identical young, female members of the same extended family.)
Entries on its evolved form Arcanine focus on a different theme, the creature’s connection to a real-world country. It is a “legendary Pokémon in China,” according to Yellow and renowned for its beauty in China, according to Stadium; the Gold and Stadium 2 Pokédexes both include the phrase “this legendary Chinese Pokémon is considered magnificent.”
Both of these aspects — Growlithe as loyal guard dog and Arcanine’s apparent origins in China — reflect one of these creatures’ main source of inspiration, the originally Chinese guardian lion-dog hybrids that have since been adopted by many other eastern Asian cultures. (The other main influences on these creatures are of course real dogs and lions.)
Unless some of the creatures discussed in this series, you don’t have to open bestiary or perhaps play a pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG to encounter these guardians. You can see them, in stone, guarding either side of the entrance to your local Buddhist temple, Japanese garden, or particularly ornate Chinese restaurant.
II.
The picture above is only one particularly spectacular example of the lions or lion/dog hybrids guarding palaces, temples, tombs and other important places in many eastern Asian cultures. And, after centuries of immigration and cultural exchange, these creatures have a growing presence in the western world, guarding not just Chinese restaurants and Buddhist temples in many different countries but also London’s Kew Gardens, Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood and the World Intellectual Property Organization Headquarters in Geneva.
They have many names: komainu in Japan; shisha on Okinawa and the surrounding islands; haetae in Korea; singha in Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Throughout this post, I will refer to this group of related creatures by their most common, Chinese name, shishi (石獅), which is used in Japanese as well.
How did this tradition begin? Part of it, as we’ll explore later, comes from what seems like a universal, archetypal need for guardian statues, which — as we’ll also explore — extends from the real world into the Pokémon world. In the case of the shishi, these creatures reflect the spread of Buddhism from India to China.
While actual lions never inhabited east Asia, Buddhist missionaries spread the lion-as-symbol across the Sinosphere. The historical Buddha used the phrase “lion’s roar” to describe his proclamations of his teachings, and those of his disciples; the Buddha himself was also known as Shakyasimha, or the lion of the Shakya clan. Because of this, the lion became a symbol of both Buddhism in general and the bodhisattvas — enlightened ones dedicated to helping others also achieve enlightenment — in particular.
The Indian art historian B.N. Goswamy notes that this symbolic lion, which reached China via the silk road about two thousand years ago, was likely also shaped by the influence of Persian lion symbolism on both Indian and central Asian culture; this lion, as seen on the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag, was a powerful royal and solar symbol. Goswamy notes a linguistic connection: “sh’ir, the original Persian from which Hindi sher comes, becomes shizi in China, and shishi in Japan.”
Buddhist lion symbolism has had two major impacts on Chinese and Chinese-influenced cultures: the shishi and the lion dance. “Once it was there,” Goswamy writes, the lion
became very swiftly one of the most widely used symbols in Chinese art. The lion was everywhere: as a guardian of gateways, supporter of thrones, element in the dance that was so much a part of popular culture. By the time the Ming dynasty came to rule, enormous bronze lions were guarding the imperial palaces of Beijing.
Like the shishi statues, the lion dance represents a myth that continues to live well outside of the confines of the museum, the bestiary, or the scholarly article; it remains a Lunar New Year tradition in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout the Chinese diaspora. The Chinese lion dance likely represents an intermarriage between the Buddhist lion and native rituals intended to scare off demons or monsters by wearing masks and making loud noises. According to one legend, the tradition began when an ancient village was beset by a lion-like monster called a nian, whose fatal flaw was its sensitivity to loud noises such as drumming and fireworks.
Like many aspects of Chinese culture, both the shishi and the lion dance were adopted and transformed in Japan.
In a scholarly article, “Symbolic Representations of Apotropaic Power in Edo-Era Japan (1603–1868),” Fumihiko Kobayashi argues that the idea of apotropaic (protective) mythical characters held particular appeal for Edo Japan. In earlier periods, Japanese thought attributed famines, epidemics, and natural disasters to divine retribution for poor governance. (This seems to be another Chinese inheritance, specifically the concept of the Mandate of Heaven that the emperor must uphold or face both political consequences such as rebellions and supernaturally driven consequences such as floods and famines.)
“As a result of this view of nature,” Kobayashi writes, “people came to assume that it was the transgression of evil spirits into the human realm that produced disease or misfortune.” Edo-era anxieties about these evil spirits led to a focus on placating them or finding protection from them on a personal and local level as well as broader societal level, which fueled the adoption of the Chinese lion dance.
In his article, Kobayashi translates the following legend, traditionally recited before Japanese lion dance performances, that tells a mythologized story of how the lion symbol originally came to Japan.
In Tenjiku [which indicates modern-day India or, to premodern Japanese, a distant land], many shishis [lions or leonine creatures] used to feed on humans. However, when the number of humans declined in India because the shishi creatures devoured too many of them, the shishis decided to dwell in Japan to devour humans there. When Japanese deities secretly received information about the plan of the shishis, the deities dispatched a fox to the Gonda riverside [today the Ganges in India] in order to negotiate with the shishis. The fox called on them, and told [them] that if the shishis exorcised all the evil spirits lurking in Japan instead of eating humans there, the Japanese people would always provide them with plenty of food and, moreover, deify them as exterminators of evil spirits. Then, following the fox, the shishis came to Japan.
(We’ve already met the cunning Japanese fox in a previous post about Vulpix and Ninetales.) According to Kobayashi, the first traveling lion dance or shishimai troupes started performing in southern Honshu in the late 16th century and had spread the tradition to all of Japan by the end of the 17th century. The same time period saw the widespread popularity of stone shishi statues as the guardians of palaces, temples and shrines in a process that Kobayashi sees as synergistic, with the shishimai dance complementing an older tradition of lion-dog statues.
An era of smallpox and cholera outbreaks created a psychological need for a more personal, portable, handheld shishi guardian, a need filled by artisans who created small lion’s head figurines called shishigashira. Shishigashira, “lion’s head,” also refers to the elaborate masks worn by Japanese lion dancers; both traditions survive to the present day, as seen below.
This traditional shishigashira illustrates just how much the shishi has changed — specifically, how doglike it has become — in its centuries-long journey from India, a country inhabited by real lions, to China and then to Japan. Centuries and hundreds of miles removed from any original encounters with lions, Chinese and Chinese-influenced artists filled some of their imaginative gaps with the features, especially facial features, of local dog breeds like the Pekingese, pug, Shar Pei, Chow Chow and Fu Quan. (And perhaps with some pieces of the tiger as well.)
Of course, the modern world — with its zoos, nature documentaries, National Geographic photographs and Google searches — makes it possible for artists of all countries and cultures to depict more realistic lions. But, as seen in the illustration above, as well as any lion dance you may have attended, the traditional creature remains the star of the show, not any real animal you could see in a zoo.
The lion-dog shishi, partially the result of unfamiliarity with an exotic creature from distant lands (like Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros) has long since taken on imaginative life in its own right. Growlithe and Canine inherit its red and gold color scheme and its combination of canine and leonine features.
III.
Guardian lions are not unique to East Asia. As I researched the shishi my mind returned again and again to the most vivid stone lion in my memory, which crouches at the feet of Edward the Black Prince’s effigy at his Canterbury Cathedral tomb. The crouching lion or dog at the feet of the deceased was a common motif in medieval European funerary sculpture, with examples in Scotland (the tomb of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan in Dunkeld Cathedral) England’s West Midlands (the tomb of John de Pitchford in a church in Shropshire) and France (multiple examples, most notably the tomb of Phillip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy).
Lions guard the outside of churches as well as the tombs within, in addition to or alongside the more notorious gargoyles. The most famous example is probably the winged Lion of Venice, which guards the entrance to the Piazza San Marco and St. Mark’s Basilica. Examples of dual lions on either side of a doorway can be found at the Basilica of San Zeno in Florence, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, Fidenza Cathedral, near Parma, in Emilia-Romagna, St. Domnius Cathedral in Split, Croatia and many other places.
Eastern Asia and medieval Europe are only two of the many times and places in which sculptors have carved lion statues to guard entrances.
Stone and bronze lions will, for instance, be quite familiar to many of my London-area readers because of their population in 19th and 20th century secular British architecture; lion statues guard Trafalgar Square, the British Museum, Westminster Bridge and the Queen Victoria Memorial directly in front of Buckingham Palace.
Consider the Mediterranean world during the bronze and iron ages, an era which saw a much wider distribution of lions than our world, where wild lions are limited to sub-Saharan Africa and India’s Gir National Park. Lions once inhabited North Africa, the Arabian peninsula and much of the ancient Near and Middle East, ranging as far north as modern day North Macedonia and as far east as India.
Guardian lions appear throughout this world’s cities and cultures, most famously at Mycenae’s Lion Gate but also on Minoan Crete, the walls of Babylon, each corner of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Temple of Ishtar at Nimrud and, as seen above, at the entrances of Etruscan tombs.
As I mentioned in a previous post about Venusaur, ancient Near Eastern sculptors combined lions with other animals or humans to create hybrid guardian monsters like sphinxes, chimeras, griffins and lamassu. The Great Sphinx of Giza is only the most famous example of these creatures, which once watched over — among many other places — the throne room at Knossos, the royal palace and temple of Ishtar at Nimrud, the Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, the temple of Amun-Ra at Tanis and the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the daughter of the sun god Ra, has a lioness’s head and a human body. (At least one statue of Sekhmet continues to perform an apotropaic function, looking out over the entrance of Sotheby’s in London.)
It should come as no surprise that the catalogue Etruscan Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the Vulci lions, as seen at the beginning of this section, as
the Etruscan response to a long tradition, stretching back to ancient Egypt and the Near East, of using sphinxes or other powerful winged hybrids, especially lions and bulls, to guard entrances and protect tombs.
Why are lions so ubiquitous as guardian statues, even, as we’ve seen, in countries with no lions? (As for why there are so often two, one on either side of a doorway, I’d point to something very simple and universal: the human love of symmetry.)
A full explanation would require much more time and space than I have available because the lion carries an almost inexhaustible treasury of symbolic association. It can represent the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, St. Mark, Ishtar, Sekhmet, Rastafarianism, England, Iran, Africa, Sri Lanka, Jerusalem, Venice, Flanders, the Mughal Empire, MGM, Peugeot, the New York Public Library, the circus, wildlife conservation and the sun.
Underlying and overlapping with most of these meanings is the lion’s status as the king of beasts, as an archetype of royal power and majesty. If you were to choose an animal to symbolically or supernaturally stand guard at the entrance to an important place, you would of course choose a formidable animal, probably a ferocious one. (In my research I have not come across pairs of rabbits or sheep guarding temple doors.) The lion’s wealth of meaning makes it an obvious choice over any other predator.
Arcanine represents the first attempt to translate this symbolic, heraldic lion into the Pokémon world. (Its spiritual descendants include the second generation legendary beast Entei and the seventh generation legendary beast and game mascot Solgaleo.) Consider, for instance, the words used to describe it in various Pokédex entries: admired, legendary, grace, beauty, magnificent, majesty.
In addition to their actual and unique names, all Pokémon also have a species or category name — usually descriptive — which can be shared. For instance, Bulbasaur, Ivysaur and Venusaur are all Seed Pokémon, Beedrill is a Poison Bee Pokémon, Vulpix and Ninetales are Fox Pokémon and Gengar is a Shadow Pokémon.
Growlithe is a Puppy Pokémon, which makes prima facie sense, but its evolution Arcanine’s species or category is Legendary Pokémon despite it not being technically a legendary Pokémon.
(In the Pokémon world [and Pokémon fandom], the adjective ‘legendary’ has slightly more specific meaning than in our own, referring to the games’ rarest creatures which appear as unique individuals — as opposed to members of species — near or at the end of the game, creatures that can only be encountered once. The first generation legendary Pokémon are the avian trio of Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres along with Mewtwo.)
In the anime’s second episode, Ash and Misty sit in the Viridian City Pokémon Center’s lobby while Ash’s Pikachu is in the emergency room. On the wall is a carved bas-relief of the three legendary birds, inspired by real-world mythical creatures like phoenixes and thunderbirds, alongside Arcanine. Why is Arcanine, a non-legendary Legendary Pokémon, fit to join the company of the Pokémon world’s most numinous creatures?
Because it’s a close relative of a legendary creature in our world, a fiery, majestic, heraldic, regal beast, a sign of the Zodiac, an embodiment of the sun: the lion, but not the lion of zoology.
IV.
As mentioned in a previous post, the seeming omnipresence of dual doorway guardians extends to the Pokémon world itself, where statues guard gym entrances. In Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow — and their remakes — pairs of these statues also guard Route 23, the entrance to the Victory Road that leads to Indigo Plateau, where the player character will compete for the league championship. The presence of these statues demonstrates that the shishi, the doorway guardians most familiar to the Japanese Game Freak team, had more than one influence on the world of Pokémon. As well as inspiring at least two Pokémon, they also inform the Pokémon world’s human culture.
V.
Recent Pokémon games have added regional variations of pre-existing Pokémon species, which differ in appearance (and often in type) while still retaining a close family resemblance. While I’ve generally focused on the original, first generation versions of the Pokémon in question, the Hisuian variations of Growlithe and Arcanine are too relevant to this post for me to ignore them. (Hisui, the setting of the Nintendo Switch game Pokémon Legends: Arceus, is a fictionalized version of Hokkaido during the Edo period.)
Unlike the original versions of these Pokémon, which are pure fire-types, the Hisian Growlithe and Arcanine are rock-fire hybrids, to reflect the stone statues that helped inspire these creatures. The changes in their designs also reflects this: their mains and tails, originally spiky, now have the drilled curls and spirals used to represent hair in sculpture. (As seen, for instance, in the Nepalese statues near the beginning of this post; also compare their tails to that of this 19th century porcelain shishi ornament.) These same manes and tails, once a fiery gold with red accents, are now the colder gray of marble, limestone or alabaster. Note also that the Hisuian Growlithe card’s flavor text describes the creature as patrolling its territory in pairs, which evokes the pairs of shishi guarding entrances.
While we’ve been on a complex, multicultural journey in this post, crossing thousands of years and thousands of miles, but I’d like to end on something much simpler, which I think may have inspired Growlithe and Arcanine: the child’s imaginative hope and/or fear that those statues might come to life.
Bibliography:
Choskyi, Jampa. “Symbolism of Animals in Buddhism.” Buddhist Himalaya, vol.1, no.1 (Summer 1988).
DePuma, Richard Daniel. Etruscan Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013.
Goswamy, B.N. “Celebrating with the Lion Dance.” The Tribune (India), 6 October 2002.
Hearn, Lafcadio. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Volume I). Houghton Mifflin, 1894.
—. Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Anthology of His Writings on the Country and Its People. Edited by Donald Richie. Tuttle, 2007.
Iati, Marisa. “How the annual lion dance draws Chinese Americans back to D.C.’s Chinatown.” Washington Post, 9 February 2024.
Kaji, Asuka. “Let’s Go to the Museum: Where the World’s Lion Guardians Roam.” The Japan News, 19 June 2019.
Kobayashi, Fumihiko. “Symbolic Representations of Apotropaic Power in Edo-Era Japan (1603–1868).” Western Folklore, vol. 80, no.2 (Spring 2021).
“Lions Roar at Japan Museum: Shishimai ‘Based on a Simple Belief.’” Toronto Sun, 23 June 2019.
Masatomo, Kawai and Robert T. Singer, eds. The Life of Animals in Japanese Art. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Ñanamoli, Bikkhu. “"The Lion's Roar: Two Discourses of the Buddha.” Edited and revised by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013
Okada, Barbra Teri. Netsuke Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Abrams, 1982.
Wong, Greg. “It’s Showtime for Performances of Lion and Dragon Dances.” San Francisco Examiner, 11 February 2024.
Author’s Note: A very happy Lunar New Year to all of my readers who celebrate that holiday. It’s a wonderful bit of synchronicity that the Pokémon I was scheduled to cover this month have roots in one of the holiday’s most beloved traditions.