Divine Names Shift Along the Kuroshio｜Yakurahime and Toyotamahime of Awa

In thinking about Japan, I have always held it to be absolutely necessary to place the ancient Ama, the peoples of the sea, at the base. How did they become one with the tides, currents, and seasonal winds that surround the Japanese archipelago, lay down the foundations of culture, and quietly bring forth the kunitsukami, particular to each land, and the unsubmissive gods who lived along lines of travel?

In modern history, it was Shinobu Orikuchi’s idea of the marebito, the visiting god from beyond, that brought this mystery to light most vividly. There is no need even to consider how it all began with gods who came from the sea. Since the Japanese archipelago is surrounded by water, unless we come to know the flow of the sea thoroughly, culture and history alike will show us nothing but their surface. This appears to me as one of the concerns facing Japan today.

Why on earth have people lost this understanding? That is what I want to think through this time.

The sound “ama,” which is tied to the Ama peoples, referred to the sea in old Yamato words. This reading, however, is dangerous. It is only a vague interpretation from the present, and if we think of the plural ancient Japan of the past, we can suppose that it was not simply a single word for the sea, nor a proper noun.

To say that it was not a proper noun is to say that some act lay within it and that it was put to use in actual daily life. People called all of this together “ama.” The problem is that people today have entirely overlooked the fact that the words of the past always carried acts within them. This structural gap in the thinking of the Japanese today has probably distorted everything, and it is the root cause of our having erased the true Japan ourselves.

What we have to consider is why, when the Kojiki was compiled, O no Yasumaro and the other compilers struggled so hard in turning sounds into written characters. The reason is clear. By the early eighth century, the original meanings and origins of the old words had already all but died out. A caveat is needed here, though. They were no longer understood “at least at the level of the officials of Yamato.” In each place and village, their origins were handed down, and their original meanings were alive.

Here the shifting world of Japan’s many sounds has settled like sediment. Take the location of Yamatai, for example. Today, claims divide endlessly, that it was in Kyushu, in the Kinai region, in Beppu, in Awa. Yet every one of them without exception removes the “movement (the act)” and merely looks at a single point separated from the land. In other words, nothing moves. In that sense, every theory of its location shares the same root problem, which is that it is not Yamatai.

It is because we look at the third century through a modern lens without ever questioning it that such a serious misstep occurs. The real problem is not where Yamatai was, but that the ground of thought people bring to it has been covered over by the modern age.

From the viewpoint of the sea, there is no separation, because there everything is enfolded, plural and not separate. If we call this the “fluid viewpoint,” it becomes clear that a point is not something that stays fixed like a stake driven into the ground. What we call a point is simply the state of here and now, always lying on a line. In other words, there is neither departure nor arrival.

Bring in Kitaro Nishida’s “logic of place” here, and it becomes even clearer. What is enfolded is enfolded by what enfolds it. This very mode is Yamatai, is Yamato, is Wa, and in the end is the naked body of the illusion that built the nation called Japan.

When we put this into practice, the key turns out to be the princess deities. Among those I have pursued so far on the Kyushu side, for example, are Hayasuihime of the Hoyo Strait, Toyotamahime of Aoshima, Ahiratsuhime of Nichinan, and the goddess of Kushira worshiped by the Hayato of Osumi. Standing on the actual ground of each of them brings the fact that the Ama peoples moved along the Kuroshio into much sharper focus.

And these must never be separated. As if to convey the truth of their non-separation, a great step toward uncovering the movements of the ancient Ama along the Kuroshio route has finally been taken. The most important place in this is Tokushima Prefecture, the old province of Awa.

The keyhole-shaped tumulus discovered in Kaiyo, in the Kaifu District of Tokushima, which I visited last year (Tara Kofun No. 1), was in danger of being destroyed by a road development plan, but it has been safely excavated since late last year. And last month, the first full-scale survey was carried out on a tumulus on the verge of vanishing on Maiko Island, an uninhabited island in Anan.

Read these as separate points, and you understand nothing. What must be seen together with these findings is in fact the Tokushima city area a little to the north. On the mountain that meets the waters off the city of Tokushima, Toyotamahime is enshrined together with another princess deity wrapped in mystery. Her name is Yakurahime.

Yakurahime appears in neither the Kojiki nor the Nihon Shoki. She is a goddess entirely particular to Awa. What matters here, though, is that “divine names shift” along the Kuroshio.

The point is that these were not separate gods existing apart from one another. It is true that the tribes were different. But because the Ama peoples by nature moved across the sea, the differences between their tribes came as close to sameness as they possibly could. The true picture is that famous Ama peoples of Kyushu, such as the Munakata, the Azumi, and the Sumiyoshi, left their influence across the entire archipelago.

For this reason, the gods of the Ama peoples in each place came to be assimilated, or syncretized, with one another to a considerable degree. This sensibility poses a rather troublesome problem. In my view, long before the syncretism of the gods and the Buddhas, there was originally a very long history of syncretism among the gods themselves. The gods we know from myth today are only the figures of “great gods,” syncretized at the end of those thousands of years.

In fact, in the arrangement of these princess deities of Awa, Ogetsuhime, the ancestral goddess of the province of Awa, is enshrined on the Kamiyama side in the mountains, as if enfolding them all through syncretism, and she connects beautifully by way of the rivers with Toyotamahime and Yakurahime on the coast.

Follow these as a single current, and read them at the same time within the cycles of the tides, currents, and seasonal winds, and you see that the names change as the places change. That is, for the first time an ancient picture emerges in which the sounds shift. Most important of all, at that very moment the act shifts too. This shift in the act is the true matrix that gave birth to the plural character of the gods, because the place, the generation of relationships, is different.

Unless we take firm possession of this arrangement and think from it, the ancient world will not come into view at all, and ancient Japan will forever remain nothing but a fantasy. Try to accomplish anything in today’s Japan from that state, and what you make will be “something that is not Japan” dressed up as Japan. As a result, Japanese culture declines, and the abilities of the Japanese are closed off.

What we must look at now is, without doubt, the Kuroshio. None of this is merely a matter of “history.”