Every Spelling of Kamimusubi in One Search｜A Homemade Deity-Name App for Shrine Journeys

In recent years, the natural disasters and sudden emergencies that strike one part of Japan or another almost every year are becoming part of ordinary life. Today is Nihyakutoka, the two hundred and tenth day counted from Risshun, the traditional first day of spring. It marks the arrival of the full typhoon season, with the rice harvest close at hand, and it has long been a time that calls for vigilance.

No individual can correct the great currents of an age, or systems that have gone too far. What an individual can do is cultivate, day by day, the readiness and the frame of mind to respond and decide on the spot, whatever situation arises. That should lead not only to survival but to a fuller life as well.

In the recent Kumamoto earthquakes, and in the heavy-rain damage in Chiba, Hokuriku, and elsewhere, the gap between those who had prepared and those who had not must have divided their fates sharply. With that in view, I have overhauled my equipment from the ground up once again for the journey that begins this month, so that I am ready for anything that may happen during the research.

The point is to steady my mind, even a little, in that moment. However much you prepare, disaster comes without warning. An earthquake of seismic intensity 7 or 8, a ferocious typhoon, a tsunami that arrives in an instant, a downpour in a concrete jungle where the water is suddenly at your waist. Faced with situations like these, the brain stops making sound judgments.

In other words, anyone’s mind is thrown into confusion for a while. Yet simply knowing how to recover your composure in that moment can change the future greatly. When it comes to disaster gear and preparation, fear tends to lead, and preparations built on fear only add to the fear the higher you stack them. How to handle this seems to me the truly important question.

What matters is to prepare in the way that suits you, and at the same time to have the sensibility to add preparations that let the journey be enjoyed to the full as a journey. Isn’t that exactly what we need now in order to live with enjoyment in Japan, the most disaster-prone country in the world?

What it takes to prepare for enjoyment differs from person to person. But it would be a waste not to use today’s world, the first in human history in which anyone can make a good deal for themselves. So for the research journey about to begin, I have been developing a set of apps of my own.

Over the years I have traveled around Japan and visited nearly a thousand shrines. Yet however much I studied Japanese mythology and history beforehand, the Kojiki above all, whenever I saw the names of the enshrined deities and the shrine histories in each place, I struggled to grasp at once which lineage a deity belonged to and in which scenes it appeared.

Japanese deity names are troublesome in the extreme. Depending on the place, the spelling differs between the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, there are many further variants, and on top of that the old and new forms of the characters overlap. Kamimusubi alone appears as Kamimusuhi, Kanmusuhi, Kamumusuhi, Kamimusubi, Kanmusubi, and Kamimusubi again, with every kind of variation in between.

Taking all of this in at a glance is hard, and until now I ran a web search on the spot every time. But measured against the bare minimum I want to know in that moment, the information flooding the world is far too wasteful. Above all, padded writing made for SEO keeps me from reaching what I need, and it often dulls my judgment and makes me lose an idea.

The iPhone’s voice input has now reached a usable level, so I dictate whatever comes to mind into notes, and back at my base I can have AI transcribe and proofread it. The genealogy of the gods, which ties into all of this, remained a stubborn problem for me.

So, drawing on these experiences, I built an app of my own that pulls out only the information I need, instantly, when I stand before a shrine’s history on site. With it, there is none of the old confusion, no going back to dig through endless web pages, and no time stolen by AI’s long-winded prose. Open it, search, and everything I need about that deity comes up at once.

The idea actually comes from the tree structures used in databases of maternal and paternal genetic lineages. I wanted to build the genealogy of the gods like a genetic tree. The genealogical charts of the gods published by Kokugakuin University and others are far too complex and are not optimized for smartphones, so they are not practical. They may serve researchers at a desk, but for someone who does research on the move, no practical genealogy exists.

I also added a function that switches a deity name’s difficult readings with one click. The app covers each enshrined deity’s lineage and its parents, siblings, and marriages in the myths, and, with the Kojiki as its base, my own database brings in the deities enshrined at Japanese shrines, including those of the Nihon Shoki, the Sendai Kuji Hongi, and the Kogo Shui, great figures of history, and the gods of local tradition.

What I take pride in as a real breakthrough is a system that covers every variation of a deity’s name and detects, all at once, even the subtle differences in kanji standards and in readings. I will use it constantly on the road, bring out what needs improving, and instruct AI in real time to fix and update it. That this kind of collaboration is now possible around the clock strikes me as a breakthrough in itself.

In other words, I develop while on the move.

The longer I keep moving, the more new ideas come to me. To speed that movement up, I prepare on the assumption that I will meet a disaster, and I make whatever I need myself. Adding these things little by little, I keep refining my own way of traveling.

As a result, I can now move house with a single 24-liter backpack. This summer, watching people forced to throw away countless cars, homes, and belongings flooded by linear rainbands, I felt strongly that we have entered an age in which we must complete our lives with only what we can carry in our own hands.

Partway through this journey I will meet up with friends and travel on together, so I have packed their emergency gear in my backpack too, quietly getting ready to enjoy whatever happens. Isn’t this both thorough preparation for disasters that may come at any time and, at the same time, the very attitude of enjoying life thoroughly?

Our home country is, after all, the most disaster-prone country in the world, and an earthquake directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area or a Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake could come at any moment. If the Tokaido corridor stops, the Japanese economy is finished on the spot. With all this in mind, I complete my life with hand luggage alone. Perhaps this spirit is the truly important element for moving forward through an age of upheaval.