Where Bells and Dragons Meet

Some thirty years ago, when I lived in a small city in rural Kyushu (the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands), I joined friends just before midnight for the Japanese New Year’s ritual Joya no Kane—the ringing out of the old year to begin the new one clean and strong. At a local Buddhist temple, each of us added our strike to the 108 rings meant to purify the world of its passions. I pulled back the heavy wooden striker and released it, striking the bell, the deep tone reverberating through my whole being and across the temple grounds for what might have been a minute or two. The sound gradually faded into silence. As instructed by the priest, I moved a small wooden stick from one bamboo basket to another to mark my ring. Stepping down from the bell tower, I was tingling, as if all my molecules had been rearranged. I felt cleansed and transformed.

Since the 7th century, shortly after Buddhism arrived in Japan, large bronze bells have hung in temple towers to mark time, call devotees to assembly, and spread the Buddha’s teachings. Known as bonsho, or Brahma bells, they have long been valued as sacred treasures, symbolically adorned and believed to offer comfort to both the living and the souls of the dead. Although several Japanese scholars have studied these monumental instruments at the heart of Buddhist life and practice in East Asia, very little has been written in English about them. Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan fills that gap. Art historian Sherry D. Fowler examines the appearance, sound, and ritual use of temple bells while tracing their deep connection to water, dragons, and the shifting histories that carried them across Japan and overseas. The book moves far beyond the temple gates, exploring how these sacred instruments have figured in local history and legend, international trade, and even postwar diplomacy.

Fowler, a professor of Japanese art history at the University of Kansas, has written extensively on Japanese Buddhist art, from premodern sculpture to temple prints and rituals. Her fascination with temple bells began while viewing an exhibition of the Five Hundred Arhats paintings by Kanō Kazunobu (1816–1863) at Tokyo’s Zojo-ji, an important Pure Land temple. In one scene, arhats ride mythical creatures toward the undersea palace of the Dragon King, where demons hold up a temple bell. Fowler wondered why the Dragon King would want a Buddhist bell—and what purpose it could serve underwater. That question sparked years of research, culminating in Buddhist Bells and Dragons, which traces how bronze bells have figured in Japan’s legends, rainmaking rituals, maritime exchanges with Korea, China, and Ryukyu (now Okinawa), and postwar diplomacy with the United States. Painstakingly researched yet accessible, the book is a significant contribution to Japanese Buddhist art history and an unexpectedly captivating read with its tales of dragons, treasure, and pirates.

Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan
By Sherry D. Fowler
University of Hawai’i Press, 2025, 360 pp., $74.00, hardcover

As a fellow Japanese art historian, I was particularly intrigued to learn about the bells themselves—their artistry, symbolism, and essential auditory qualities. Buddhism arrived in Japan from China and Korea around the 6th century, bringing many ritual objects, including bronze temple bells. Shaped like barrels with wide bases, their decorated surfaces were divided into grids and topped with neatly arranged rows of knobs called bosses. Like their Chinese and Korean counterparts, early examples featured images of Buddhas, celestial beings who dwell in the sky (Skt.: apsara; Jp.: tennyo), and lotus-shaped strike plates on two sides. Many adopted the 

Korean-style dragon loop at the top of the bell—possibly an East Asian interpretation of the Indian naga, the water serpent deity of Buddhist lore. 

Over time, Japanese bells developed distinctive features that deepened their spiritual meaning as instruments of faith. By the 16th century, the bosses were often arranged into four grids of twenty-five, with two between each grid—108 in total, representing the Buddhist 108 worldly desires. The lower section was divided into a grid pattern known as kesadasuki (“monk surplice-pattern”), after the patchwork robes of Buddhist monks. Most striking of all was their sound. In temples, these bells ring out the “voice of the Buddha,” issuing a deep, resonant sound said to calm the living and ease the suffering of the dead. Fowler notes that a perfect tone—called oshiki (“yellow bell”)—evoked harmony and impermanence, capturing the essence of Buddhist teachings in sound. 

These bells soon took on a life of their own in local lore, legends, and rituals connected to the sea and dragons.

Beyond their role as sacred Buddhist instruments and temple treasures, Fowler explains, these bells soon took on a life of their own in local lore, legends, and rituals connected to the sea and dragons. The aquatic association may stem from early Japanese texts that likened their ringing to the cries of mythical sea creatures attacked by whales. It may also be due to the dragon loops at the top of the bells, which visually linked them to these powerful guardians of the dharma. Certain bells became associated with the Dragon King’s undersea palace, which was believed to hoard all sorts of treasure. Most famously, the 8th-century bell of Mii-dera, a temple near Kyoto, is said to have surfaced from the Dragon King’s palace and magically appeared at the temple. Centuries later, it was seized as a war trophy in battles between rival temples and immortalized in the legend of the mighty warrior Benkei, often depicted lifting the massive Mii-dera bell above his head. 

Another celebrated story comes from Dojo-ji, a Tendai temple farther south of Kyoto, where the bell plays a more tragic role. In legends and picture scrolls, a young woman falls in love with a Buddhist priest who rejects her and hides from her advances under the temple bell. Enraged, she transforms into a dragon, coils around the bell, and burns both the bell and the priest within before fleeing into the nearby river. Their association with water and dragons—controllers of rain—also led to the use of temple bells in amagoi (rainmaking) rituals, where they were submerged in water at the shore or carried through village streets in local festivals. Fowler shows how these overlapping stories of transformation, loss, and renewal expanded the meaning of bells beyond their ritual sound, embedding them in Japan’s imagination and landscape.

Even more fascinating, perhaps, than the many legends of the mythical appearance and movement of bells are the actual stories of bells traveling “under and over water, in and out of Japan.” For centuries, bells crossed the seas as part of cultural and mercantile exchange between Japan and its closest neighbors, Korea and Ryukyu.

Fowler explains that at least sixty bells traveled from Korea to Japan, with some supposedly transported by pirates, while most likely arriving as legitimate trade items or diplomatic gifts. Many crossed the sea after the 14th century, when Buddhism declined in Korea under Neo-Confucian influence, prompting temples to sell their treasures to Japan and Ryukyu. Bells also traveled in the opposite direction: Japanese bells were sent to Buddhist temples in Ryukyu, and in time, Ryukyuan artisans began casting their own. 

Japanese bells developed distinctive features that deepened their spiritual meaning as instruments of faith.

The largest displacement, however, occurred during World War II, when temple bells—created to comfort the dead and guide them toward salvation—were removed from their bell towers, melted down, and turned into lethal weapons of war. In the 1940s, some 45,000 bells disappeared from temples and shrines across Japan. Of those spared, few ever returned to their original homes. Some were taken as war trophies or souvenirs by US military personnel, only to later reappear as symbols of reconciliation.

The most famous of these is the 15th-century Gokoku-ji bell, seized from the Ryukyu Islands by Commodore Perry in 1854. It was mounted in 1858 at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where it was rung after Navy football victories. A century later, the bell was returned to the Ryukyu Islands as a gesture of friendship and peace, and now resides in the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum, with a replica gifted to the US Naval Academy in return. Fowler’s account of this journey—laden with loss, rediscovery, and diplomacy—reminds us that even sacred objects can become vessels of history.

I would have relished a few more pages—a whole chapter even—on the fabrication of these bells and the communities of artists who made them. Still, the breadth of Fowler’s impressive study—rich with detail on artistry, literature, religion, local and regional history, politics, and diplomacy—opened my eyes to a fascinating aspect of Japanese spiritual culture of which I had been only dimly aware. I hope to make it to Japan again soon for New Year’s Eve —I am sure that the next time I ring a temple bell, it will resonate even more deeply.