Okuninushi

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A flayed hare lay on the shore at Cape Keta, in the country of Inaba, weeping in the wind. A train of brothers had passed before, eighty of them by the reckoning of the old texts, gods all, on their way to court a beautiful woman; and they had told the wounded creature to wash in the salt sea and lie in the wind on a high place, which only cracked its raw skin worse. Last in the line, carrying the brothers’ baggage like a servant, came the youngest and least of them. He stopped. He told the hare to wash in fresh water at the river-mouth, to gather the pollen of the cattail flowers, scatter it, and roll there. The fur grew back. The hare, which in the telling is no ordinary animal, looked at the bag-carrier and said that he, not his cruel elders, would win the woman. So the Kojiki opens the public life of the kami who would become master of the land.

That kami is Ōkuninushi (Ōkuninushi-no-Kami), a name that means “master of the great land” — ō, great; kuni, land or country; nushi, master or lord. He bears it only at the end of a long climb. He begins as Ōnamuji (also given as Ōanamuchi), the despised youngest of a vast brotherhood, and rises through kindness, ordeal, and a series of deaths to become lord of Izumo and orderer of the central country of the world. He is, within the kami world rendered here as it understands itself, the great builder of the visible realm — and then the one who gives it away.

Genealogy: the youngest of many, descended from the storm

The chronicles that hold his story were compiled to a purpose, and that purpose shapes the genealogy. The Kojiki (“Record of Ancient Matters,” 712) and the Nihon Shoki (“Chronicles of Japan,” 720) were assembled at the Yamato court to fix the order of the kami and to ground the imperial line in descent from the sun. Within that frame Ōkuninushi stands on the other side of a great division: he belongs to the kunitsukami, the kami of the land, the earthly gods, as against the amatsukami, the heavenly gods of the High Plain. His house is the house of the storm.

The Kojiki makes him a sixth-generation descendant of Susanoo, the storm-kami expelled from heaven who, having descended into the land of Izumo, slew the eight-headed serpent and married there. The Nihon Shoki, which preserves variant accounts side by side as a matter of method, in places makes Ōkuninushi the direct son of Susanoo and his bride. The variance is itself the record: these were living traditions, set down with their seams showing, and the reader is meant to see more than one thread. What holds across them is the lineage of earth and storm, set apart from the lineage of the sun who is the imperial ancestress, Amaterasu.

His rise is a sequence of trials, and the trials begin in murder. When the eighty brothers — the yasokami — learn that the woman of Inaba has chosen Ōnamuji over all of them, they resolve to kill him. They heat a great boulder to the color of a wild boar, tell him to catch the “boar” they will drive down the mountain, and roll the burning stone onto him; he is scorched to death clutching it. His mother appeals to a creator-kami, and two shellfish goddesses scrape and tend and restore him to life. The brothers kill him again, crushing him in the cleft of a felled tree; again his mother revives him. She sends him away for safety, and he goes down at last into the underworld, Ne-no-kuni, the root-land, to take counsel of his ancestor Susanoo.

There the testing turns from murder to ordeal. Susanoo sets him in a chamber of snakes, then a chamber of centipedes and wasps, sends him into a burning meadow, and orders him to pick the lice from his hair. He survives each through the secret help of Susanoo’s daughter, Suseribime, whom he loves: a scarf to still the snakes, a mouse who shows him a hollow in the ground beneath the fire. In the end he binds the sleeping Susanoo’s hair to the rafters of the hall and flees with the daughter, the sword, the bow, and the great zither of his ancestor. Susanoo, waking, pursues to the slope that divides the worlds — and there, instead of a curse, gives a kind of blessing: from then on, Susanoo calls after him, he shall be Ōkuninushi, master of the great land, and Utsushikunitama, the spirit of the living land, and shall take the daughter to wife and build his palace. The despised younger son returns and drives out his brothers and is lord.

Teaching: the maker of the visible world

What Ōkuninushi does with the land is the heart of his significance. He is not chiefly a warrior or a sun, but a maker and a settler, and the tradition gives him a partner for the work.

The white hare of Inaba and Ōkuninushi (then Ōnamuji), illustration by Kakuzō Fujiyama from The Japanese Fairy Book (1908). Public domain (published before 1931). Via Wikimedia Commons.

Across the sea, riding the waves in a tiny boat made from a heavenly-vine pod or a pod of the kagami plant, dressed in the skin of a small bird, came a dwarf kami so small that no one could name him. A scarecrow-deity, who stands still in the fields and so knows everything, identified him: this was Sukunabikona, child of one of the creator kami, slipped through the fingers of his divine parent. Ōkuninushi and Sukunabikona became sworn companions, and together — the great land-master and the tiny one — they “made and consolidated” the land. They fixed the methods of healing for the sicknesses of human beings, and they established the wards and charms against the calamities of birds and beasts and creeping things and pests, so that the people might live. From this work Ōkuninushi takes his standing as the patron of medicine, of agriculture, and of the protective magic that keeps a settled life safe. When the work was far along, Sukunabikona crossed to the eternal land beyond the sea and was gone, and Ōkuninushi grieved that he must finish alone — until another spirit offered to help, on condition of being worshipped on a mountain to the east, a kami the tradition links to Mount Miwa.

He is also, and famously, the kami of the binding of bonds. The verb musubu means to tie or to bind, and en is the unseen thread of relation, of affinity, of fate that joins one life to another. En-musubi, the tying of fated bonds, is his particular gift. The mythic ground is his own many marriages — to the woman of Inaba, to Suseribime, to others across the land, fathering many kami including Kotoshironushi and the strong Takeminakata — but the cult that grew from it is wider than romance. The bond he ties may be a marriage, a friendship, a partnership, a piece of good fortune; he is the kami people approach when they wish two things or two lives to be joined.

Teaching: the cession of the visible realm

The decisive act of his story is a surrender. It is also the founding settlement of the Japanese sacred order as the court that wrote it down wished it remembered — the kuni-yuzuri, the “transfer of the land,” in which sovereignty passes from the kami of earth to the line of heaven.

In the telling, Amaterasu and the heavenly council look down from the High Plain at the Central Land of Reed Plains — Ōkuninushi’s well-ordered country — and decide it should belong to the heir of the sun. They send envoys to demand it. The first is won over to Ōkuninushi’s side and sends back no word; the second, sent to find the first, marries into the land and likewise falls silent; only with a third embassy is the demand pressed home. Down to the shore of Inasa, on the coast of Izumo, comes the thunder-and-sword kami Takemikazuchi. He plants his blade upturned on the crest of the waves and sits cross-legged on its point, and asks Ōkuninushi whether he will yield the land.

Ōkuninushi defers to his sons. One, Kotoshironushi, agrees at once and withdraws. The other, Takeminakata, refuses and seizes the envoy’s arm to wrestle for it; his own hand is turned to ice and then to a blade, and he is broken and pursued across the country to the far lake of Suwa, where he submits and vows never to leave it — the origin, in the tradition, of his shrine there. With both sons bound to the heavenly will, Ōkuninushi yields.

But he yields on a condition, and the condition is the key to who he becomes. He will give up the visible realm — the manifest world, the rule of what can be seen and governed — and he asks in return a single thing: that a dwelling be built for him with pillars planted deep on the rock-roots below and timbers raised high toward the High Plain, a palace as great as the dwelling of the heavenly heir. This is the founding of the great shrine of Izumo, Izumo Taisha. And he withdraws — not into nothing, but into the kakuriyo, the hidden world, the realm of the unseen, set against the utsushiyo, the manifest world now passing to the line of the sun. Ōkuninushi takes the divine things, the affairs of the spirits and the gods and the dead, the unseen order behind the visible; the heavenly heir takes the open governance of the day-lit land. The world is split in two, and Ōkuninushi rules the half that does not show.

It is essential to mark the source-distance here. This myth is not a neutral memory; it is the charter of a settlement, written by the winners. The Yamato court that commissioned the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki had its own interest in a story where the great power of Izumo cedes the realm willingly and is honored with a shrine for doing so. Whether the cession reflects a real political subordination of an old Izumo power to the rising Yamato state is a matter scholars weigh and cannot finally settle; the Yamato descent-claim and the historicity of the early reigns belong to contested ground, not to fact. What is not contested is that Izumo stands in the resulting order as the great counter-pole — the seat of the unseen, set opposite the heavenly cult of the throne at Ise.

Reception: the other pole of the sacred world

The honden (main hall) of Izumo Taisha, in the ancient taisha-zukuri style. Photo by Mti, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The shrine he asked for is, in its present form, among the most distinctive in the country. Its main hall is built in the taisha-zukuri manner, held to be the oldest of the shrine architectures, with an off-center entrance reached by a stair and nine pillars in an asymmetric plan. The present honden, raised in 1744 and standing about 24 meters high, is already imposing — but the tradition, and now the spade, insist it was once far greater. Records from around the year 950 describe a structure of sixteen jō, some 48 meters, taller than the great hall that then housed the colossal Buddha at Tōdai-ji. For a long time this was treated as legend. Then in 2000 excavators at the site uncovered the bases of enormous pillars — clusters of huge cedar trunks bound together — consistent with a structure of just such towering height. The once-improbable tradition of a sky-reaching hall acquired physical ground.

Worship at Izumo keeps its own forms, marking it apart from the ordinary rite. Where most shrines take two claps, here the worshipper offers four; the inner deity is held to face not south but west, out toward the sea. And once a year the place fills with gods. In the tenth month of the old lunar calendar, the tradition holds, the myriad kami of the whole land leave their own shrines and travel to Izumo to confer. For this reason the rest of the country calls that month Kannazuki, the month with no gods, while in Izumo alone it is Kamiarizuki, the month when the gods are present. What the assembled kami are said to decide is fitting to the lord of bonds: the matches and unions of the coming year, who shall be joined to whom. A week of rites, the Kamiari-sai, marks the gathering and the gods’ departure; in the present calendar it falls around late November. Travelers come to Izumo for it, and come above all for en-musubi — to ask the great binder of fates to tie a marriage, or a friendship, or a fortune.

A statue of Daikoku with a rabbit — the genial syncretic form of Ōkuninushi — at an Izumo Taisha branch shrine in Osaka. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

His afterlife in worship runs through the long age when kami and buddhas were honored together. For roughly a thousand years, until the state forced them apart, the kami world and the Buddhist world were intertwined under the logic of honji-suijaku — the doctrine that the kami were the local “traces” or manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, their “original ground.” Within that synthesis Ōkuninushi was drawn together with Daikokuten, the dark guardian deity of Indian Buddhist origin (a form of Mahākāla) who in Japan became one of the seven gods of fortune. A pun helped the fusion along: the characters of his name can be read Daikoku, and Daikoku-ten shares the sound — so the master of the great land and the god of the great black earth became, in the popular imagination, the same genial figure with the mallet and the rice-bales, Daikoku-sama, bringer of wealth and good harvest. The two had domains in common, fertile earth and prosperity, and the popular cult merged them. When the Meiji government in 1868 ordered the separation of kami from buddhas (shinbutsu bunri) and an anti-Buddhist iconoclasm followed, the institutions were split apart by decree — but the easy familiarity of Daikoku-sama, the smiling household god of plenty, had already outgrown any line a state could draw, and it survives.

In the larger architecture of the tradition he holds a particular place. He is the kami who built and ordered the world that can be seen, and then handed it to another and stepped into the world that cannot. Izumo is his seat, and Izumo is the standing counterweight to the heavenly cult of the throne — the realm of the unseen, of the spirits and the dead and the divine, set against the manifest realm of the sun’s descendants. The throne keeps the day; he keeps what lies behind it. Of the kami whose stories the old chronicles tell, he is the one who measures greatness not by what is held but by what is given up — the youngest brother who carried the bags, healed the hare, made the land livable, and then, asked for it, let it go.

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