The First God May Have Been the Tide

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

For in its oldest stratum, the Japanese sound ama meant the sea (海).

Even today, along coastlines throughout Japan, people who make their living diving and fishing in the sea are still called ama (海人・海女).

Out of that vital need arose the worship of Amaterasu—not as "the deity who illuminates heaven," but as 海照神, the deity who illuminates the sea.

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?