Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine and Kamotsuba Shrine｜Two Koto Deities, One of Word and One of Deed

The Kojiki was completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki in 720. Both date from the early eighth century and are the oldest surviving books in Japan, yet today hardly anyone reads them.

They were written more than a thousand years ago, but the ground that allowed them to be widely read was laid not so very long ago. In the Edo period, Norinaga Motoori, the scholar of Kokugaku, spent more than thirty years working his way through the Kojiki, and in 1798 he finished the manuscript of his Kojiki-den. Only when all forty-four volumes were published, from around 1822 after his death, was the foundation in place for the Kojiki to be widely read.

For the thousand years before the Kojiki-den appeared, the Nihon Shoki more or less had the stage to itself. The Kojiki was scarcely ever mentioned, and it ranked low among the books that learned people cared about. And yet it survived for a thousand years. That fact is where the fascination of the Kojiki lies hidden.

Norinaga’s Kojiki-den set off a structural turning point, after which the Kojiki came to be valued above the Nihon Shoki. His successor Atsutane Hirata then reinterpreted his master’s work from a spiritual standpoint and opened a door that connected it to religious movements. Coinciding with the unsettled times of the late Edo period, this set off an explosion of religious movements, in region after region, that took the Kojiki as their foundation.

They would later be classified as new religions, and on the whole they were born in regions far from Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Kurozumikyo arose in Okayama in 1814, Konkokyo in the same Okayama in 1859, and the source of Tenrikyo in Nara in 1838, while many other new religions appeared at the same time across western Japan. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Oomoto emerged in Ayabe, in Kyoto Prefecture, as the culmination of them all, and the new religions reached a kind of peak.

Their founders were people possessed by the gods or gifted with spiritual powers, but the spiritual foundation they shared was the Kojiki as it had passed through Atsutane Hirata. Why should the Kojiki hold a power that awakens spiritual abilities? To put that mystery into words, Atsutane Hirata’s disciples spread the idea of kotodama [言霊], the spirit that dwells in words.

For some people, kotodama remains a spiritual foundation even now, but apart from the Manyoshu, which preserves the earliest traces of the word being used in a poetic, intuitive way, it cannot be traced any further back. Still, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki present Hitokotonushi [一言主神], who dwells at the foot of Mount Katsuragi, as a god, and the belief that this god is the ancestral deity of kotodama remains strong to this day. The ancestors of the Japanese, who originally had no need of a written culture, conveyed the world to one another through sound, or rather through vibration, and so they shared the idea that the gods were reflected in sound itself.

For them, using writing was an act that confined the gods of a boundless world of sound that could never be fully grasped, and there was a time when it was shunned as an evil thing.

The Manyoshu records Yamanoue no Okura’s lines, “That this is a land where the spirit of words brings blessings, so it has been told and handed down,” and Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s “This land of Yamato, of Shikishima, is a land the spirit of words sustains. May all be well,” as well as “At the crossroads of eighty ways, where the spirit of words dwells, I ask the evening oracle.” Hitomaro’s poems in particular became the source of the later belief in kotodama.

Yet in those days, a plural world lived within the single sound “koto.” The sense that koto is both “word” [言] and “deed” [事] gave rise in myth to Hitokotonushi, the god of the word, and Kotoshironushi [事代主神], the god of the deed. What is intriguing is that the two gods are rooted side by side.

In the mountain range that rises along the border between Osaka and Nara, Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine stands at the foot of Mount Katsuragi, and Kamotsuba Shrine stands on the plain below it. Under today’s boundaries both shrines lie in the city of Gose in Nara Prefecture, and it is possible that the whole area belonged to a single sphere of power from early times. Hitokotonushi is enshrined at Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine, and Kotoshironushi at Kamotsuba Shrine. The two gods of “koto” live together side by side, and in that very arrangement I seem to see the sensibility that the ancient Japanese had grasped.

Who, then, presided over this faith in “koto”? The answer still handed down today is the Katsuragi clan, a lineage wrapped in mystery. Historically, the Katsuragi are said to have been tied to a royal line close to Emperor Nintoku, which is to say that they were one of the main groups that raised the great king Nintoku to the throne.

As an ancient clan, they held overwhelming power in the fifth century and reigned over ancient Yamato, yet by the early sixth century they had already fallen, and what became of them afterward is unknown. Yet across the area, many Kofun-period sites that speak of the Katsuragi clan’s golden age have been found, and the most striking among them are haniwa, clay figures shaped with superb skill.

What makes this region difficult is that it has become layered, because one clan after another replaced its predecessors. The typical example is the way the names of the two shrines that honor the two gods of “koto” begin differently, one with “Katsuragi” and the other with “Kamo.” This preserves the traces of the new Kamo clan (賀茂氏, also written 加茂氏 or 鴨氏) settling over the area around the time of the Katsuragi clan’s fall and in the ages that followed, and it is possible that the Kamo, a rising clan of immigrant origin, inherited the legacy of the Katsuragi.

Later, when the capital moved to Heian-kyo, the Kamo, who held enormous influence over the aristocrats and the imperial family, worked behind the scenes from a base around the present Shimogamo Shrine. But they were, after all, newcomers from across the sea.

The traces of many layers still remain at the foot of Mount Katsuragi. It is the gods divided into two kinds of “koto” that pass them on to us.