Represented by an ox, this deity plays an important role in student life, particularly during examinations. He embodies a scholar of the Heian period.

For the first few centuries, then, Tenjin was seen as a god of natural disasters, worshipped to placate him and avoid his curses. However, Michizane was a famous poet and scholar in his lifetime, one of the greatest of the Heian Period, and in the Edo Period scholars and educators came to regard him as a patron of scholarship.