Divine Names Are Born in Places

The god does not put his name on nature, on trees or stones. What the god names, it says, is a place. The god himself is declaring that a name is generated in a place. No such passage exists anywhere else. And right after this, it is written that he set down his spirit and marked out his fields, and this act is tied directly to the founding of the land. In Japan, then, all gods, Susanoo among them, have no substance. That is the shape of antiquity.

What holds these together, I believe, is the acts of the people who live in that place. Seen simply, it looks as though the god's name becomes the land's name and the land's name becomes the god's. But neither comes first, because what generates them is the living acts of people in the place. To put it another way, it is a world without a subject.

A name, then, is not something given but something that arises of itself. And that is exactly why Susanoo was also a god who gives names. In the Kojiki, Onamuchi comes to Ne no Katasukuni, the land Susanoo rules, and overcomes a series of trials, and as he sets out from that land, it is Susanoo who gives him the name Okuninushi. Mediating this is Onamuchi's marriage to Susanoo's daughter Suseribime. In a foreign place, an alien visiting god, helped by a princess goddess of that land, passes through his trials, and as he departs he receives a name from the god who rules the country.

That is how the names of the gods were generated. The environment of a place, in other words, is what remains of the names of the gods of old. So there are as many names as there are places. Japan's yaoyorozu no kami, its eight million gods, is not animism; it is a word for exactly this. And every one of those names is true, because where the place differs, the relation differs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At its undercurrent lies, from the view of kotodama faith, a belief that a name is deeply bound to a person's character and soul. So a name was thought not a mere mark to tell individuals apart but to express that person's soul. For one's true name, also called "mana," to be known or called by another carried the fear that the other would hold one's soul, and people in fact held considerable fear and anxiety over it. In fact, in ancient times and also in the Middle Ages, there were many cases where a person was destroyed by the grudge of an enemy through his real name being known, and secret arts of cursing and torturing by name even flourished. We can learn from the Tale of Genji that the nobler a person, the more often he drew others' jealousy and anger, and nobles kept their real names secret to protect themselves and avoid calamity, and also used it to show the greatest respect to the other.

In this way, names have been treated as special in Japan since antiquity, and its influence can be seen even now. Even in business it is out of the question to call a superior or an elder by the given name, and the habit of calling by family name or title shows respect for the name itself and a psychological distance. Though we seldom notice it, the historical culture of "respecting and being careful with names" can be said to be still handed down, unbroken, in our Japanese society.