Awa's Goddesses: Shrines the Kojiki Left Out

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.

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.

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. … 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.

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.

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.

The ancient clan that settled here called itself "Kamo." It is written 鴨, 賀茂, or 加茂 in kanji, and the name survives in many places across Japan; the best known is Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto. That is, as the Yakami tribe were the roots of Yakami-hime, here we have the Kamo tribe. The sacred place that these ancient Kamo revered most was Mount Tsurugi in Tokushima.

Mount Tsurugi is rugged mountain country, and yet people live deep in its interior even now. The famous tradition says that most of those living there today are descended from Heike who, when the Heike lost to the Genji in the late 12th century, fled their lands and hid deep in Mount Tsurugi, and various sites of that tradition remain. But before that age, the deep interior of Mount Tsurugi was the "hidden village" of the Kamo tribe, where they hid and kept up their own faith. Many traditions about the Kamo are rooted on the mountain, and at the summit there is even a place said to have been used by the Kamo for rites.

The Kamo then gradually opened up the plains of the middle reaches of the Yoshino River, and the place name "Kamo district" remains there to this day. When they settled the land, they enshrined their ancestral god, and this is the origin of today's Kamo Shrine. The main deity is Wakeikazuchi (別雷神), formally Kamo Wakeikazuchi no Mikoto (賀茂別雷命).

The purpose of the Shikoku survey is the riddle of the ancient clans. Japan had many ancient clans, and I am astonished by how many were of immigrant origin. Most came from China and Korea, but some may reach as far as Central Asia and the Middle East, so we may need to consider that tribes from a much wider range were naturalized here.

So, investigating as I went, I entered Shikoku. Along the Yoshino River in Tokushima, the cultural spheres of the western and eastern parts differ greatly, because the two were opened up by different immigrant tribes. To look into this, one has to go through place names, shrines, enshrined deities, faith, and traditions.