Ogetsuhime and Otsuki in Hata｜A Goddess Whose Origins Lie in the Kuroshio

In Japanese myth, Izanagi and Izanami give birth to the land, and many provinces are born. The one that has held my interest longest is Awa, and its goddess Ogetsuhime (大宜都比売).

Ogetsuhime is often identified with the food deities Ukemochi and Toyouke, as a goddess merged with them. Yet in Kamiyama, a town in the mountains of Tokushima Prefecture, sacred ground devoted to Ogetsuhime still survives, and the goddess is enshrined at Kamiichinomiya Oawa Shrine. The moment you set foot on Mount Oawa, you feel a sanctity that reaches back to ancient times.

What has drawn me personally is the sound of her name before the characters “Ogetsuhime” were assigned to it. Taken simply, the name means “the princess of some tribe called Ogetsu,” and it calls up a history in which a queen-like figure who led that tribe came as far as Awa and took root there.

In a sense, I think that in the early eighth century, when the compilation of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki was under way, the imperial family and the ancient clans on the side of the Yamato court spoke of Awa under the name Ogetsuhime. In other words, might it be a later telling, from Yamato, of how a tribe called Ogetsu came in, and of the history of mingling that followed?

I say this because in the southwest of Kochi Prefecture the name Hata District (幡多郡) still survives, and within it lies the town of Otsuki (大月町). Otsuki is a broad area stretching toward Cape Ashizuri in the southwest of Shikoku, near the first landfall on the Kuroshio route I have been following.

Put simply, it can be read as an ancient history in which people who reached this land along the Kuroshio later moved further east and flourished around Kamiyama in Awa. Interestingly, the district name Hata speaks strongly of traces of the Hata clan (秦氏), who came across the sea in the Kofun period and were the real financiers behind the move of the capital to Heian-kyo. So this region carries traces of the Hata clan while a world called Otsuki exists alongside it. For me, it is the most fascinating parallel world of all.

As I said, this is also where the Kuroshio Current first strikes the Japanese archipelago, and the footprints still most vivid here are those of two clans, the Kamo and the Mononobe. The Kamo moved east from here toward Awa, built settlements deep in the Yoshino River valley and revered Mount Tsurugi as sacred ground. Later, in the age of the move to Heian-kyo, they made their base around today’s Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines and drove out the Izumo-line tribes who had been living there.

The Mononobe, for their part, were among the foremost of the ancient clans, yet, as I wrote in last week’s blog, surprisingly Kochi Prefecture still has the Monobe River (物部川), and sacred sites dedicated to their ancestral god Nigihayahi remain to this day. From this, it seems to me we must hold one more perspective: that the ancient clans were moving east along the Kuroshio. Until now, after all, we have looked only at the eastward route through the Seto Inland Sea, symbolized by the Eastern Expedition of Jimmu.

And then Otsuki in Hata. The name Otsuki points to the Yuezhi (大月氏), a tribal confederation that existed from the ancient Middle East to Central Asia, and about whom we still know almost nothing. But in the course of migrations, and of flight from war, they may in time have crossed over to the Japanese archipelago.

Indeed, given the history of the Hata clan, who later crossed to the archipelago and built considerable power, we cannot rule out that a tribe spoken of as the Yuezhi came to Japan in the same era. What became of these people from across the sea afterward I do not know, but they surely had some hand in history.

Then a new possibility comes into view: that their crossing and their route east did not pass through Kyushu and run along the Seto Inland Sea, but rode the Kuroshio instead.

Could it be that the name of the goddess Ogetsuhime, which still survives in Awa, is at its origin deeply tied to the footprints left by the place name Otsuki in southwestern Shikoku? We should not take lightly a history of movement like this rising to the surface here.

Of course, this whole area is wrapped in mystery, and because so little research has been done, much of it remains impossible to make out. Even so, the goddess of Awa may, surprisingly, have had her origins in the Kuroshio.