The first god may have been the tide

LIVING QUESTIONS

Over the past two days I took a ferry three times and looked at the sea to my heart's content. Even living in an island country, unless you are a fisherman, you now hardly ever go out on the water. But if you want to look at your own country calmly and objectively, as a whole, I feel strongly that you must place yourself on the sea, not in an airplane looking down from the sky.

Japan is a country of the sea, and a country of mountains. Go out on the water and look back at the archipelago, and you meet a view of mountains running along the horizon.

Standing on deck in the early morning, I wondered why I had suddenly begun to seek out the sea. Nothing in my life so far has bound me closely to it. Perhaps it is because there are genes in me that once came across the sea. It is an ancient memory, not my own, and one I still go on inheriting. Seen that way, perhaps every human being alive today carries a memory of once having crossed the sea.

That memory lies deep in people's hearts, but it may be a cruel one they would rather not recall. That is why, however many decades they live on land, it never surfaces. Yet the ancestors of humanity once made the decision to leave the African continent. We exist today only because someone went out to sea prepared to die.

Wherever we are now and however we live, we are the descendants of those who came through that ordeal. Every Homo sapiens surely carries "the memory of the sea," but it is also a nameless unease, something perhaps sealed away in some forgotten age.

Still, now and then that memory rises from the depths, regardless of my will. Something in me whispers, "Time to go out to sea," and I follow that voice out onto the water. Mornings when I go out to sea are thrilling. The changing tides, the movement of the waves, the sunlight striking the surface and flashing back, the countless islands floating on the sea: every one of them seizes my heart and will not let go. So I never sit in my seat on the boat. However many hours the voyage lasts, I stand on deck the whole time with my camera gripped in my right hand. Whether I am exposed to wind and rain or nearly blown away, I seek out that strength of nature as if to awaken my own genes.

Humanity looks upward far too much, as if it meant to climb into heaven. If what we truly need is not to climb up but to dive down to the depths, then humanity has spent vast sums of money, labor and energy on an enormous waste of effort. And I believe that Homo sapiens, caught in the trap of that waste, has already lost its next move.

Everyone says there is a future, but in truth there is no future there. The future always lies in the primordial memory of each one of us, and in diving deep toward it without fear. True courage, true bravery, has nothing to do with going to Mars. It lies in diving toward the depths of ourselves that our ancestors once sealed away, and facing the memory that is there.

In a squall under gathering dark clouds, with the salt wind lashing me, I could not help thinking so.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

Summer sunlight that did not feel like mid-September, and squalls attacking again and again. Japan too seems to have lost its four seasons and split into a rainy season and a dry one. Amid all this, I was making a whirlwind journey around southwestern Shikoku. My purpose was not the famous pilgrimage but the Kuroshio.

It may be unfamiliar, but in Japanese terms the Kuroshio is a current that runs north past Okinawa and Amami and heads from southeastern Kyushu toward southwestern Shikoku. Near the western shore of the Ashizuri Peninsula in Kochi, where I was, it first touches the main islands. From there it travels east, past Wakayama, Mie, Tokai and Kanto, and out to the east.

Migratory fish such as bonito, tuna and yellowtail move on the Kuroshio, so the seas around Japan are fine fishing grounds for them, and they have sustained the Japanese diet. Kochi is especially famous for bonito fishing, with two seasons a year, spring (March to May) and autumn (September to November). People in Kochi eat more than five times the national average of bonito per person; bonito is their culture itself. Eat bonito in a city and it has lost its freshness and much of its taste, but bonito eaten in Kochi is in a class of its own.

Less well known is that Kochi is not only about the sea. It is also one of the richest lands in forest, with a forest cover of about 84 percent, the highest in Japan, and distinctive cultures survive in its mountains. This time, though, my purpose was the current along the coast.

What is interesting about the Kuroshio is that, though it is a source of life, it actually carries little of the plankton fish feed on. So it is a clear current, free of murk, and you can tell it is the Kuroshio even from far away. Its very name comes from this clarity, which makes the surface look blue-black.

I have been captivated by the Kuroshio, and from last year into this one I have traveled to many places in search of it. The reason is not that it brings delicious fish. Just as fish ride the Kuroshio toward the Japanese archipelago, things other than fish have ridden this current to these islands. The foremost of them is plants.

The sight of coconuts drifting ashore on the Kuroshio became well known through Kaijo no Michi (The Road on the Sea), the culminating work of the folklorist Kunio Yanagita's last years. On the Ashizuri Peninsula in Kochi, too, plants that drifted up from the south on the Kuroshio, such as biro and ako, grow wild. In Okinawa the biro is called kuba, and it has long been believed that the gods of heaven descend to earth by way of it. It is, in other words, a sacred tree. That is why kuba always grows in Okinawa's sacred places.

Since such a faith survives in Okinawa, at the source of the Kuroshio, we can suppose that customs of the same kind once existed throughout the Kuroshio's sphere. Above all, a place called Usubae on the western shore of the Ashizuri Peninsula is where the Kuroshio first touches the main islands of Japan.

But looking at one particular place in isolation reveals nothing. So let us turn our eyes west from here, to the east coast of the island of Kyushu. Take Aoshima in Miyazaki, which I visited last year. On this small island, pure stands of biro make up about a sixth of the plant community, and some of the trees are more than 350 years old. Aoshima Shrine, of long history, stands there, and two accounts of the biro have been handed down: that they are relics of ancient vegetation, and that they drifted in on the Kuroshio. What is certain at least is that the Kuroshio has been an "invisible god" that kept carrying abundant life to the Japanese archipelago since antiquity.

In fact, last year's research left me with one question. There is no doubt that the Kuroshio has carried rich life to the Japanese archipelago since the distant past. If so, it is a little strange that we find no trace of ancient people who worshipped the Kuroshio, and no being equivalent to a god of the Kuroshio.

On the other hand, there are many "gods associated with the Kuroshio." That was the line I was following last year: almost as if following the belt of the Kuroshio, the princesses of the ancient sea peoples kept offering prayers to the gods. These are usually said to have been prayers for safe voyages, and the princesses of tribes who lived by the sea are thought to have calmed the sea as priestesses. But the story is not that simple.

I sense a common thread among the lands connected with the Kuroshio. It is the possibility that the sea peoples were not set apart as beings of the sea but were a primordial group who also held a faith in the mountains. Traces of this in fact remain today in many forms, and this time too, as I traveled through southern and southwestern Shikoku, I found that shrines sitting quietly deep in the mountains, for some reason, bear many traces of fishermen. If anything, it looks as though "the mountain god" were enshrined by fishermen.

At the cape at the tip of the Ashizuri Peninsula, too, a small shrine to "the mountain god" remains, and there as well fishermen have left many messages of thanks for their catch; almost everyone who keeps it is connected with fishing. In this way the sea and the mountains were never really separate; there is no doubt they existed as a single sphere. Japan is a country of the sea and also a country of mountains, and I feel we must not forget this view of their inseparability.

My personal sense is that the ancient priestesses who calmed the currents were concentrated in southeastern Kyushu, near the Kuroshio, but the question is what god they prayed to. Its form did not show itself in last year's research in Kyushu, but in this year's research across southwestern Shikoku I feel it has begun to appear a little. A strong key lies in the sound tojin (唐人).

What complicates things is that for a long time "tojin" was used for migrants from overseas. And because it is written 唐人, we must not limit it to the people of the Tang dynasty that flourished in China. What we must look at is not the characters but the sound before it became characters. We must dive deep toward the sound that was fused with the writing. This way of thinking also holds in the Shingon esoteric Buddhism of Kukai, who has deep ties to Shikoku. 唐 has the readings to and kara, and these had their origins in old times in marking migrant tribes.

Some limit to and kara to the people of ancient China or Korea, but that is wrong. It is better to think of them as a concept pointing broadly to people who came across the sea. What I realized on this journey, though, is that we must go back to an even older layer. Before these sounds were gathered into words for some kind of people, in other words, there was the form of a primordial god.

On the Ashizuri Peninsula, in fact, it is handed down that the sound tojin meant "a shining place," that is, "the place where the gods dwell." As if to point to that ancient layer, the summit of the Ashizuri Peninsula holds the Tojin Daba site, with countless huge iwakura (磐座), sacred rocks, scattered across it. Today tojin is thought to mean foreigners and daba a flat place, but we must think about what came before. The site has probably been broken by the great Nankai Trough earthquakes that have struck this region through history, but had it kept its ancient form, an eerie and overwhelming scene would have spread out there.

From the site you can look out over the whole Kuroshio, and this suggests an ancient layer in which it was named tojin because, seen from the sea by the sea peoples, sunlight struck it and made it shine. Understanding this view is extremely important. In fact, at places where things drift ashore on the Kuroshio, megaliths and great tombs were built and worshipped as if designed to be seen "from the sea" rather than "from the land." The Kamezuka Kofun in Oita, a great keyhole-shaped tomb, was built on high ground facing the sea and covered with white quartz stones, and when sunlight strikes it, it shines dazzlingly.

Above all, the Kamezuka Kofun is the tomb of a chief of the Amabe clan, who bound together the ancient sea peoples, and we can suppose that moving across the sea was itself power and that they held a very large sphere of influence. The huge keyhole-shaped tombs of Sakai and Kawachi in Osaka, which later became the scene of the great age of tomb building, keep no trace of it now, but they too were once, without exception, designed with the tribes who saw them from the sea and the waterways in mind.

If the ancient layer I have described is the origin of "tojin," then the Japanese word seems to have shifted its meaning little by little while holding two states at once: shifting and fusing at the same time, in a state hard to grasp. In the original memory, in other words, "tojin" did not mean migrants; it was a word for the shining place, the place where the gods dwell, as seen by people traveling the sea. It may then have gradually fused with the foreigners who came across the sea and would later be called tojin. The reason is the amatsukami (天つ神), the gods who came across the sea.

The place where the gods dwell, the shining place as seen by the sea peoples, gradually took on substance as the amatsukami who had come across the sea, and in the end came to rest in calling migrants tojin. After fusing over long ages, the ancient layer may have been overwritten yet survived faintly in place names and in faith. Seen this way, the words tojin, or words containing 唐 (to, kara), found all over the country may in their origin share a consistent thread, and they may have been scattered not among people but along the flow of the tide. For it is not only plants, like the biro and the ako, that ride the tide and drift ashore.

There is also a tradition that Ashizuri stood for "Sada" in the old language. Sada is connected with a god enshrined in Izumo Province (the coast of today's Shimane) called Sada no Okami, and this god is Sarutahiko. Sarutahiko is the god who, in the myths, guided the descendants of the amatsukami on their descent, linked the amatsukami and the kunitsukami (国つ神), showed the way as a god of guidance, and led those who drifted in to the places where they were meant to arrive.

Then, just as plants drifted up from the south and took root, Sarutahiko, a god who has yet to show his true form, may have been symbolized not only by the movement of gods on the Kuroshio and the Tsushima Current but also by the spread of plants. For plants drifting ashore and taking root need no human power at all.

Sarutahiko is still wrapped in mystery, but my own feeling is that he began as the worship, as a god, of the invisible power that brought the biro and others ashore of their own accord, and I am beginning to think that his origin, surprisingly, may have been "the tide." The tide carries plants, carries the blessing of fish, carries people, and carries gods. Seen this way, in southern Shikoku it would have been the Kuroshio.

Western and southwestern Shikoku still hold many untouched mysteries. Most people have only the image of Kukai's pilgrimage, but Shikoku is also said to be the land where Japan began, and countless strange mysteries lie scattered everywhere, unexplained and buried.

Think of the gods of Japan as being like human beings with bodies, and you will misread them completely. This time I stood on cape after cape and cliff after cliff, watching the Kuroshio for hours. The current undulates like a dragon and stretches far into the distance. We assume that we "do not know the gods," but perhaps this is the primordial god. Then the god was always there. Is that not the true identity of the gods of Japan?