国譲りと出雲大社The Transfer of the Land and Izumo Taisha

The kuniyuzuri (国譲り) recorded in Japanese mythology is a story centered on Izumo Taisha, the grand shrine built in the city of Izumo in Shimane Prefecture. It is also a memory of events that occurred in ancient Japan. The founding dates of the great majority of Japanese shrines are unknown. The oldest among them trace their origins to the "age of the gods," and mythology serves as their basis. Izumo Taisha is one of these ancient shrines. Its founding is grounded in mythology, and to this day its chief priest belongs to a clan whose authority derives from that mythology. This is an extraordinarily rare circumstance.

When the Meiji era began in 1868, the new rulers of the Meiji government set about negating the entire Edo period in order to lend legitimacy to the hegemony they had seized from the Tokugawa shogunal house through violent revolution. The target was the Japanese-style Confucianism that had wielded immense influence during the Edo period. The government was searching for a new philosophical foundation for the regime. Buddhism had built an era of its own but had rapidly lost its power after the onset of the Edo period. Confucianism was too closely associated with the Edo era to adopt. It was at this point that the Meiji government turned its attention to Shinto. But Shinto had no clear definition then and has none now, and the Meiji government adopted it without understanding it. Only one thing can be said with certainty. The Meiji government adopted something other than Buddhism or Confucianism. This new direction would later transform into Shrine Shinto and State Shinto, opening the curtain on a complex modern history of Shinto.

Having decided to adopt Shinto as the philosophical basis of the new regime, the Meiji government next began demanding centralized control over Shinto. But Shinto, though its origins are uncertain, possessed prototypical forms of faith that long predated the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Even today the gods are called Yaoyorozu (the myriad deities). The faiths associated with these countless gods exist in as many forms as there are places on the Japanese archipelago and in as many forms as there are natural phenomena. They are far beyond the capacity of any central government to manage in a unified manner. But because this would not serve the new government's purposes, two coercive measures were imposed. These were the Prohibition of Hereditary Shrine Priesthood in 1871 and the Shrine Consolidation Order of 1906.

Historically the management of shrines took many forms. A specific clan might serve as chief priest and venerate the deity, or a village community might collectively maintain the rites. But at major shrines governing entire regions the influence was powerful enough to resist even government directives. The priestly clans of shrines with particularly ancient origins were assumed to hold lineages spanning more than a thousand years, and because their historical relationships with the imperial house were also involved, they maintained immense influence in their local communities. The Meiji government sought to nullify this regional influence of the shrines and bring them under central control. Its method was to prohibit hereditary succession and thereby absorb faith into the bureaucratic apparatus. This was carried out from the perspective of creating a national populace, which was indispensable to the modern state. As a result, the great majority of shrines lost their regional influence and many were excluded from shrine administration.

Having confirmed the effectiveness of dismantling the influence of major shrines and placing them under centralized management, the Meiji government then moved to concentrate faith entirely within the state. This was the second measure, the Shrine Consolidation Order. It aimed to forcibly merge and reorganize the diverse shrines that had been dispersed across the land into a system manageable by the central government. In essence it was a measure for bureaucratic administration. What matters is that both measures used faith and Shinto as their pretext while the substance was the establishment of a modern bureaucratic system.

These two acts of state-level destruction caused the ancient faiths to enter a state of unease. But without these measures, something as undefinable as Shinto could not have been deployed as a state philosophy. Through this process the great majority of shrines had their hereditary priesthoods prohibited and expelled. The vacancies were filled by central government officials. Eventually the situation reached the point where qualification as a shrine priest required a degree from a Shinto university, and today ninety-nine percent of shrine priests are people who came through this system. But even in such an era, a small number of shrines possessed the authority to refuse the government's demands. The foremost among them was Izumo Taisha. The clan of Izumo Taisha managed to survive the impact of the Meiji-era prohibition on hereditary succession. In accordance with customs dating to antiquity, a specific clan continues to serve as chief priest through hereditary succession to this day.

This is not possible through mere historical antiquity alone. It requires having gathered deep faith from the local community and having earned the people's strong trust. In my own experience, having visited countless shrines across Japan, no shrine inspires faith as deep as Izumo Taisha. It remains a source of spiritual support for a great many Japanese people. Geographically it stands in a remote area far from the major cities, yet I visit once a year to pay my respects.

The fact that a small number of shrines survived the pressure of the Meiji government and continue their hereditary succession to this day transmits the strength and resilience of the faith that the Japanese once held. What then is the origin of Izumo Taisha, a shrine of such extraordinary spiritual power? Regrettably this is almost never discussed. In this piece I will draw on perspectives developed through my own research and unravel the story by crossing mythology with ancient history.

The stage of the kuniyuzuri myth is the province of Izumo. Ancient Izumo referred to a large region encompassing present-day Izumo City in Shimane Prefecture and its surroundings. But complicating matters is the fact that ancient Izumo once formed a vast sphere of influence governing a wide area of the Japanese archipelago. I call this the "Izumo sphere." Think of its headquarters as being located in the province of Izumo. For an accessible comparison, imagine the EU with its center placed in Brussels. The Izumo sphere was not established in a military sense. It was a loose solidarity maintained through ritual, expanded not through subjugation but through the conclusion of alliances.

To understand this myth, two concepts are essential: amatsukami (天つ神) and kunitsukami (国つ神). Amatsukami is written with the character 天 (ama), which today leads us to imagine a celestial realm, but this was not the ancient understanding. Before the use of Chinese characters, the sound Ama in ancient Japanese was a common word for the sea. It was a word belonging to the seafaring peoples. By the time Japanese mythology was compiled into written texts, the use of Chinese characters had already spread among the court elite, and the meaning carried by these ancient sounds had been forgotten. Ancient sounds in particular cannot be reduced to a single meaning. Even in the case of Ama, for the sea clans it meant the sea, but it is assumed that the meaning shifted depending on the context.

What is fascinating is that Japan has preserved the meanings of ancient words that were already forgotten at the time the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were compiled, and it has done so through place names. Among the places I myself have visited, many place names associate Ama with the sea. The island of Amami Oshima off Kyushu is a classic example. Other place names such as 海部, 阿麻, and 海士 survive in diverse forms as Ama. The fact that all of them are names for strategic coastal locations must not be overlooked.

This suggests that the origin of the amatsukami was connected to the sea. It is an ancient memory transmitting the story of gods who crossed the sea. In this connection the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi made a compelling observation. He stated that the gods of Japan transformed through three layers: "gods arriving from the sea," then "gods arriving from the mountain," then "gods arriving from the heavens." And that within this three-layered structure, a faith unique to Japan was nurtured. The transformation of the amatsukami is assumed to have followed this process. But by the time the Kojiki was compiled in 712, this faith had already come to refer to the celestial realm. Put differently, the amatsukami were elevated from the sea to the heavens by the rulers of the Yamato court who were involved in compiling the Kojiki.

For this reason, in the kuniyuzuri the amatsukami side is narrated from the image of the celestial realm. Specifically, Amaterasu, the sovereign of the amatsukami, works to persuade the surrender of the land held by the Izumo sphere. The reason the amatsukami were moved from the horizontal plane of the sea to the celestial realm was the political intention of linking Amaterasu to the solar deity. Today the name is written 天照大神, meaning "the great god who illuminates the heavens." But in the ancient faith Amaterasu was "the god who illuminates the sea," with origins in the worship of the sea clans. The drive to position Amaterasu as the ancestral deity of the imperial house intensified under Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686), who was precisely the person who ordered the compilation of the Kojiki. It was around this period that Amaterasu, once a guardian deity of the sea, was transformed into the solar deity of the celestial realm.

At the same time, the concept of the kunitsukami was placed in mythology in opposition to the amatsukami. If we consider the era when Ama meant the sea, then the kunitsukami were the indigenous gods as opposed to the gods from outside. They were most likely the gods of the Japanese archipelago originating in the Jomon period. The amatsukami side referred to the land of the kunitsukami as Ashiharanakakuni (葦原中国). Behind this worldview lies the suggestion that the amatsukami were formed from the faith of an agrarian people. In other words, the kunitsukami were not agrarian.

Amaterasu sought to have the gods of her lineage descend into Ashiharanakakuni. To do this she asked Okuninushi, the Izumo deity who presided over the various kunitsukami, to cede the vast land that contained the reed plain. This Okuninushi is the principal deity of the present-day Izumo Taisha and one of the oldest gods in Japan. Written 大国主, the name means "the lord who governs the great land".

But the kuniyuzuri involves the entanglement of multiple layers of history. Mythology does not transmit historical fact directly, yet it does transmit some memory of history. It transcends any "specific era" and does not possess the linear world of "past to present to future." My view is that myth is a non-linear world that compresses history. A single story compresses millennia of historical memory. With this perspective in mind, the most fundamental point is the name of the myth itself.

This is critical. The story is about "ceding the land," not "seizing the land." The amatsukami did not take the land by force. Through negotiation between the amatsukami and the kunitsukami, the land was ceded. Furthermore, the sovereign of the amatsukami, Amaterasu herself, did not move a single step. The negotiations were conducted by gods selected and dispatched by the amatsukami side. This suggests that when Japanese mythology was being compiled, political circumstances existed that prevented Amaterasu from being depicted as acting directly. What exactly does this mean? Let us turn to ancient history.

Ancient Japan possessed three ancestral populations connected to the roots of present-day Japanese. The first belongs to the earliest Jomon period, the second to the Yayoi period, and the third to the Kofun period. These names derive from archaeological periodization. The Jomon period was named for the distinctive cord-marked patterns on its pottery. The Yayoi period was named for distinctive pottery discovered in the Yayoi district of Tokyo. Only the Kofun period refers to the era in which burial mounds began to be constructed as a funerary custom. The peoples of each era can be said to have held entirely different faiths and customs. The intermixing of these three formed the matrix of Japan and the Japanese people. In this piece I focus on the Jomon and Yayoi periods.

For clarity, let us provisionally equate the kunitsukami with the Jomon people and the amatsukami with the Yayoi people. As a premise, the Yayoi had their origins near the West Liao River in northeast Asia and were the people who once formed the Hongshan culture. They crossed the sea. But the crucial point is that they were not the wet-rice paddy agriculturalists seen in south-central China. They were millet farmers. Japanese history still completely misreads this and teaches that the Yayoi brought wet-rice agriculture. That is wrong. The people who brought wet-rice agriculture were the Kofun people, who arrived later and had their roots in East Asia.

The Yayoi, the amatsukami, were a population that formed the Hongshan culture, which existed from approximately 4,700 to 2,900 BCE across an area spanning northern Hebei Province, southeastern Inner Mongolia, and western Liaoning Province. Most of this region is desert today, but during a limited period from 12,000 to 4,000 years ago it was blessed with rich water resources, lakes, marshes, and forests, and it supported great development. However, global-scale climate change that began around 4,200 years ago triggered renewed desertification. From roughly 4,000 years ago onward, these people began a great migration in search of new lands. The migration split broadly into southward and westward directions. The groups that moved south eventually reached the Japanese archipelago as their final destination. The groups that moved west reached Scandinavia. This is why Japanese mythology and Norse mythology have long been known to share commonalities. These derive from the common ancestor in northeast Asia. When these people abandoned their homeland, what they carried with them were the seeds of millet essential to their livelihood. This fact would go on to relate in complex ways to later Japanese myths and traditions. Critically, they did not carry rice seeds.

Over a period of several hundred years they reached the Korean Peninsula in stages. While intermixing in complex ways they maintained their own customs and ultimately crossed to the Japanese archipelago. It is known that for a period in antiquity, the Japanese archipelago and the southern Korean Peninsula existed within the same cultural sphere. This was not because one side conquered the other but because a common ancestral population lived on both sides of the Sea of Japan. For a time they spoke a mutually intelligible language. But upheaval on the Korean Peninsula side later eliminated this population there, leaving the people who had crossed to the Japanese side. The language of these people who had crossed to Japan is the root of the present-day Japanese language.

Nor did they carry the genes of the Hongshan culture's ancestors in a pure sense. Considerable time had passed since they left their homeland, and the memory of the Hongshan culture had been idealized as their lost homeland. But they were not the only ones who had fled climate change. The Korean Peninsula became a gathering point for countless tribes fleeing from various places. With limited land, struggles over territory naturally erupted.

The Hongshan people were not by nature warlike. They had no choice but to flee, and fleeing meant crossing the sea. But they were a people with no connection to the sea. If we imagine our own ancestors crossing the Red Sea out of Africa, we can understand that for people with no relationship to the sea, crossing it is a kind of madness that requires an extraordinary resolve. Conversely, it is from that madness and resolve that a powerful faith is born.

It was not by chance that a faith arose among them at this moment. That faith was in migratory birds. Settled agrarian peoples are keen observers, and the Hongshan people knew that certain birds returned to their land at certain seasons. But they could never have imagined that those birds had been crossing the sea. Having reached the southern Korean Peninsula, these people needed to cross the Sea of Japan before them to escape skirmishes with other tribes. Confronted with this desperate situation, the hearts of these born farmers must have been filled with unimaginable anxiety. They had no choice but to trust the words of a local tribe that knew the sea: "If you ride this current you will reach new land." There was no guarantee. But their keen powers of observation led them to notice the birds that flew out across the sea. The sight of birds departing toward the far side of the water before their eyes was enough to make them believe that new land existed there. In their desperation they began to believe that wherever the birds flew, new land would surely be found.

Here the ancient faith that "birds show the way" was born. In mythology too, during the Jimmu Tosei (the eastward expedition of the legendary first Emperor Jimmu), birds appear repeatedly as saviors showing the path to a company driven to the brink of despair. These are memories of the people who crossed the sea and vestiges of the faith they transmitted. In fact, the Yayoi people who reached the Japanese archipelago by crossing the sea held an extraordinarily strong faith in birds. The Jomon had not drawn images on their pottery. The Yayoi left multiple images on theirs. Among the motifs are birds, ships, the sea, the sun, and ritual scenes. Most symbolically, scenes are depicted in which a bird perches on the prow of a ship and indicates the direction of travel. The crew followed the bird's lead and rowed until their strength gave out. In other words, the pictorial imagery on Yayoi pottery is proof that these people cherished their roots. It is imbued with deep respect and awe for the ancestors who had crossed the sea. The birds that had safely carried those ancestors were deified. On Yayoi pottery, scenes are depicted in which the officiating priest of a tribal ritual wears the garb of a bird and venerates the gods as a bird.

This is one origin of the amatsukami. At the same time, Japanese mythology features Takamagahara (高天原) as the sacred land of the amatsukami. For the Yayoi this represented the sacred land of their origins near the West Liao River, the homeland of the Hongshan culture. It was their idealized homeland. The crucial point is that by the time the Yayoi held this faith, their homeland had already been lost. The location of Takamagahara naturally shifts depending on which ancestral group is in question. But for the great majority of the Yayoi it was northeast Asia. By the time the East Asian-rooted Kofun people appeared, it shifted to western Asia, though I will not address that here.

By this point the picture of the Yayoi as the amatsukami becomes clear. They were agrarian people who carried millet seeds and crossed the sea. Let us now return to the myth.

According to the myth, when the amatsukami of Takamagahara resolved to pacify Ashiharanakakuni, the dispatch of gods was divided into three broad stages. The first envoy, Amenohohi, was co-opted by Okuninushi. Three years passed with no report. His son Takehiratori likewise did not return. As a second measure, Amenowakahiko was dispatched carrying a bow and arrows. But he too married Shitateruhime, the daughter of Ajisukitakahikone, born of a union between Okuninushi and a goddess who is the principal deity of Munakata Taisha in northern Kyushu. He too was co-opted. After eight years without word, the exasperated amatsukami dispatched a vassal deified as a pheasant to investigate. But Amenowakahiko used the very bow and arrows granted to him by the amatsukami to shoot and kill the pheasant, and the arrow reached all the way to the heavens. Having reached an impasse, the amatsukami finally resolved to dispatch a full-scale negotiation mission backed by military force. They sent the warrior gods Takemikazuchi and Futsunushi.

Here the place where the warrior god descends reveals the form of ancient Japan. Takemikazuchi descended at Inasa no Hama, a beach near Izumo Taisha. Izumo Taisha is built on land along the Sea of Japan coast. The ancient shrine building is said to have stood forty-eight meters tall. What demands attention here is the ancient Japanese custom of calling the tenth month of the lunar calendar kannazuki (神無月). Various readings existed historically, including Kaminazuki and Kamunazuki, and multiple orthographies as well. But the critical point is that in Izumo alone the month is not called kannazuki. It is still called kamiarizuki (神在月). Read through the characters, across all of Japan the gods are absent in this month, but in Izumo alone the gods are present. In other words, the gods of the entire country leave their lands, set out, and gather in Izumo. To welcome the arriving gods, the oldest ritual of Izumo Taisha, the kamimukaesai (神迎祭), is still held in the tenth month of the lunar calendar.

I witnessed it once. The kamimukaesai begins at seven in the evening on the darkened beach of Inasa, in an ancient world illuminated only by the bonfires lit by the priests of Izumo Taisha. The surroundings are pitch dark. An eerie flame rises. Priests in formal vestments stand arrayed around it. In the silence only the sound of the waves and the recitation of prayers reverberate. In this visionary world the gods "arrive from the sea." The gods do not "descend from the heavens." They "descend from the sea." The fact that Inasa no Hama is the place of their descent transmits a memory from an extremely ancient time. The gods who have come ashore are greeted by the priests, guided quietly to Izumo Taisha, and the various rituals proceed. At Izumo Taisha and other ancient shrines, the movement of the gods always takes place at night. The gods do not receive the light of day. At one shrine I spoke with, the custom of conducting any transfer of deities at night is still observed today, even when it is a temporary relocation during reconstruction.

The figure of Takemikazuchi descending at Inasa no Hama suggests the arrival of people from across the sea. In the myth Takemikazuchi plants his sword upside down in the sand and demands that Okuninushi cede the land. Okuninushi replies that he does not mind if his two sons consent. The two sons who appear are Kotoshironushi and Takeminakata. I have investigated Kotoshironushi extensively, but his origins have been lost and his true nature is elusive. He was most likely an indigenous god of either ancient Yamato (the south-central Nara Basin) or the province of Awa (present-day Tokushima). Takeminakata is the principal deity of the ancient shrine Suwa Taisha in Suwa City, Nagano Prefecture. He is the god of Suwa.

In the myth Kotoshironushi consents, but Takeminakata challenges Takemikazuchi. Here for the first time a clash erupts between the amatsukami and the kunitsukami side. Takeminakata is defeated and flees, and it is recorded that he escaped to Suwa where he was confined. The kuniyuzuri thus succeeds. What the amatsukami constructed for Okuninushi to withdraw into was the origin of the present-day Izumo Taisha. It was anciently called Kizuki Taisha. The name Izumo Taisha is a later designation. Furthermore, when the construction of Izumo Taisha began, the amatsukami appointed the first envoy Amenohohi as the person responsible for the rituals. This figure would later become the ancestral deity of the clan, connecting to the present-day priestly family of Izumo Taisha. Such is the kind of staggering origin that ancient shrines possess.

But as noted, myth compresses millennia of history. This entire narrative shares that quality. Events from multiple eras are compressed into one, and a complex and pluralistic world is transmitted as a single story. Through my own research I have become convinced that the Yayoi people who arrived by crossing the sea did not engage in territorial conflict with the indigenous Jomon. The Jomon and the Yayoi coexisted. In practice the Jomon were partially settled but fundamentally seasonal hunter-gatherers whose sphere of life was the mountains and the sea. For the Jomon, who made full use of the seasonal bounty of nature, the vast reed plains of the Japanese archipelago were largely wetland environments unsuitable for habitation. But the Yayoi, whose livelihood was based on the cultivation of millet, tubers, and vegetables and who possessed the skills to clear land, were different. The non-living zone of the Jomon was the living zone of the Yayoi. For the Yayoi who had lost their homeland and migrated, the reed plains that the Jomon had left untouched were land worthy of a new beginning.

This is why the myth says "ceding," not "seizing." The myth transmits this properly. The partial military clash that occurred with the god of Suwa was due to circumstances specific to Suwa at the time. I will write about this on another occasion.

A survey of several archaeological datasets reveals that the Yayoi advanced across the Japanese archipelago by threading through the gaps in the Jomon living sphere. Whether they negotiated over the use of the reed plains is unknown, but at a minimum a picture of peaceful coexistence emerges. In this process the two peoples mutually influenced each other's customs. The Jomon partially adopted agriculture. Conversely, the Yayoi received the bounty of mountain and sea from the Jomon. For settled Yayoi people, mobile tribes like the Jomon became gods who appeared at certain seasons.

In particular, the Yayoi, a new tribal group on the Japanese archipelago, had no knowledge of the rituals the Jomon had long performed to appease the gods of the land. For the Yayoi to live richly and long in their new territory, it was essential to venerate the nature deities specific to that land and perform the appropriate rites. They therefore invited the indigenous Jomon to visit at fixed times each year and perform the rituals. In return they hosted them with harvested grain and sake. I believe this relationship between the two peoples is the origin of the Oni legends found throughout Japan and of the faith in gods who arrive as visitors.

In certain places the Jomon and Yayoi intermixed, and a new era dawned. This process unfolded over centuries to millennia. Faiths and oral traditions must have crossed as well.

In this way, Japanese mythology strikes me as far more than simply the basis of Shinto. It transmits the memory of the ancestors of the Japanese from a distant age. What matters most is the archaeological fact that the era in which the province of Izumo achieved its prosperity was not the Jomon but the Yayoi period. In the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki compiled by the court, and in other documents as well, Izumo was originally described not as a land worthy of prosperity but as a den of evil, a place people did not approach. The turning point at which this negative impression of Izumo was transformed came not when Okuninushi became its leader but earlier in the mythology. That figure is Susanoo, who appears as Amaterasu's brother.

The prosperity of Izumo was a joint product born from the historical intersection of Jomon and Yayoi. But at the same time, there may have been unsettling factors in the new era that forced Izumo to become a powerful kingdom. That shadow of unease would eventually become the direct cause of the Yayoi's sudden disappearance from the Japanese archipelago in a later era.

What was this unsettling event?

And who was Susanoo, the figure so deeply connected to Izumo?

Within the intersection of mythology and ancient history lies the still unresolved memory of our ancestors, sleeping.