Okuninushi Has No True Name｜Susanoo in the Izumo Fudoki and the Divine Names of Places

We call the principal deity of the great shrine in Izumo by the name Okuninushi. Yet this god has no true name.

The Kojiki lists Onamuchi, Ashiharashikoo, Yachihoko, Utsushikunitama, and finally Okuninushi, and it goes out of its way to add a note that, taken together, he has five names. One of the variant accounts in the Nihon Shoki goes further and adds Omononushi and Okunitama to the list. In the Izumo Fudoki, however, the record that gathered the traditions of Izumo itself, something strange happens.

The name Okuninushi never appears, not even once. From beginning to end the god is called Ame-no-shita-tsukurashishi Okami, the Great God Who Made All Under Heaven, or Onamochi, and neither the famous White Hare of Inaba nor his trials in the Land of Roots is told at all. Move on to Harima, and the protagonist of the Harima Fudoki is Iwa no Okami, a god who appears there as Onamuchi.

Which, then, is the true name? It is the question itself that is mistaken.

Since modern times, those who have tried to answer this question have explained, without exception, that a single god acquired different names in different regions. Tying myth directly to history, they argued from the standpoint of a single acting subject that as the power of Izumo spread, alias after alias piled up on one personality. Words such as “alias,” “alternative name,” and “the same deity” are what remains of that way of thinking.

The reality is the reverse. The names did not multiply. They were countless from the very beginning, and it is in the process by which they were bundled into a single god that we find the traces of how the divinity called Okuninushi came into being. Two gods were decisively involved in that process, the god who stays and the god who leaves.

The primordial god of Izumo is Susanoo, whom the myths cast as the younger brother of Amaterasu. Yet in the scenes of the Izumo Fudoki where Susanoo appears, there is not a single line about his famous slaying of the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi. He appears only once, and very briefly, in the township of Susa in Iishi District.

There Susanoo declares that this land is small but a good place, and that he will therefore not attach his name to trees or stones. Having said so, he settles his own spirit in this land and establishes the rice fields of Osusada and Kosusada. I believe this passage is the prototype of Japanese faith.

Not to trees, and not to stones. What the name attaches to is the place. The god himself is declaring that a name is something generated in a place, and right after that, the text records that he set down his spirit and established the fields. The god called Susanoo, then, or rather every one of the gods, has no substance of its own. That is what antiquity looked like.

A name, a spirit, and land that is tilled. What binds them together are the acts of the people who live on that land, and this is how the place name Susa was born. The name of the god becomes the name of the land, and the name of the land becomes the name of the god. Neither comes first, because what generates them both is the living activity of people in a place.

A name, in other words, is not given. It arises of itself. That is precisely why Susanoo was also a god who conferred names. In the Kojiki, it was none other than Susanoo who gave the name Okuninushi to Onamuchi after he had come through the trials of the Land of Roots. The name Okuninushi, “the one who rules the land,” came from the mouth of the native god of Izumo, and the weight of that fact sheds light on where myth itself comes from.

Next, the god who leaves.

There is a tale set after Onamuchi had received his name and gone forth. A tiny god comes drifting in from beyond the sea to a cape in Izumo, riding a boat made from a gagaimo seed pod and dressed in the skin of a goose. Yet no one knows his name.

Then Taniguku, a toad, says that Kuebiko would surely know. Kuebiko is the Sohodo of the mountain paddies, the scarecrow that stands in a rice field, which is to say a god of the place. The Kojiki describes him as a god who, “though his feet do not walk, knows all things under heaven.” One who cannot walk knows everything under heaven. And Kuebiko at once gave the newcomer his name, saying that he was Sukunabikona, child of Kamimusubi.

Whatever we make of the myth itself, what matters is that a god did not know the name of a god. The one who knew it was the one who kept standing in a single field and never went anywhere, which suggests that what knew the name was the place itself. Sukunabikona, in other words, had come to visit Kuebiko, a god of the place, many times before.

Sukunabikona belongs to no place, and because he belongs nowhere, no one can call him by name. Here lies the prototype of the god that Shinobu Orikuchi would later call the marebito, the visitor who comes from beyond.

The two gods built the land together, but of Sukunabikona’s departure the record says only that he climbed a stalk of millet, was flung off, and crossed over to Tokoyo, the eternal land across the sea. A visiting god must not stay in one place. If he stayed, he would become an unmoving god of the place. Only because he leaves can he come again and bring wisdom with him. The very working of going away and returning was the true body of this god.

There are, then, gods who dwell in a place, and gods who go and return, gods who never stop moving. That plural world was the very world our ancestors once lived in.

The question, then, is the one who is left behind, and the Nihon Shoki describes what came next. As Onamuchi, now alone, laments over who will govern this land, something again comes drifting in, this time lighting up the sea, and declares who it is.

“I am your sakimitama and kushimitama,” it says, “your soul of blessing and your soul of wonder.” The god had not known his own soul until it named itself to him. That soul then asked for a place, asking to dwell on Mount Mimoro, today’s Mount Miwa, and the moment it was given a place, it became another name, Omononushi, the principal deity of Omiwa Shrine.

He received his name from the god who attached names to the land, joined forces with a god who came from the sea, was left behind by that god, and at last divided himself and set a part of himself on a mountain in Yamato. At the end of this process there rises a divinity who rules the land beyond any single place. Okuninushi, in other words, was not one god from birth. He is the very movement of tension in which a plural mode of being, generated between the god who stays and the god who leaves, comes to be generated as one. Myth is not tracing history.

Why, then, did the names have to be plural? Because the act of prayer has no grammatical subject. More than that, it has no acting self, no subjective point of view, and no ego.

Ask who is praying, and no answer comes. Ask what is being prayed to, and no answer comes either. Our ancestors never lived in a world in which subject and object were split apart in the first place. They simply lived in a place, and that life was a chain of everyday acts, carried on and handed down. There was no subject. If there was anything of the kind, it would have been the place itself, the village, or the family.

Prayer is the relationship that rises up between people and nature in a place and enfolds them both, and it belongs to neither of them. Because it is a relationship, it always belongs to a place. Prayer in the valley of Iwa, prayer on the mountain of Miwa, and prayer in the fields of Susa can never become the same thing, because the water, the wind, and the food all differ, and so does the quality of awe. When the quality differs, the form in which it appears differs, and when the form differs, the sound differs. This is what fudo means, the climate and character of a land.

That is how names were generated. Fudo, in other words, is what the names of the gods once were. That is why there are as many names as there are places. Yaoyorozu, the “eight million” gods, is a word for exactly this state of affairs. And every one of those names is true, because when the place differs, the relationship differs.

In 1871, however, as the modern system of shrine ranks was put in place, the shrine name Kizuki Taisha, which named a place, was discarded. The shrine was renamed Izumo Taisha, taking the name of the province of Izumo, the very land that had been ceded to Amaterasu, who had been made the ancestral deity of the imperial line. The name of a place vanished and was replaced by the name of a territory. We have walked in exactly the opposite direction from that declaration, “not on trees or stones will I set my name, but on this land.”

What vanished, though, was our way of seeing, not the gods. Even now the kunitsukami dwell in shrines across the country, in Iwa under the name of Iwa, in Miwa under the name of Miwa, and in Susa under the name of Susa. And from beyond the sea, season after season, something still arrives and goes back again. That there are so many names means that there are so many places.

What we need to recover over the second half of the twenty-first century may not be the correct name at all, but a return to place so complete that we no longer need names.

Welcome to the plural world.