The Fudoki: Gods the Center Left Out

When the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were compiled, in 712 and 720, the forty-third sovereign, Empress Genmei, who had ordered the traditions set down in writing, issued another edict at the same time: that the traditions surviving in each region be gathered into documents particular to their lands. The project was first called ge (解), and by the Heian period it was known as fudoki (風土記).

Under the ritsuryo system of the day, the court recognized more than sixty provinces on the archipelago, so about sixty fudoki were probably made. Most are lost, and only five survive. The one complete text is the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki for Izumo (Shimane Prefecture), the subject of last week's article. … The Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki (Ibaraki), the Harima no Kuni Fudoki (Hyogo), the Bungo no Kuni Fudoki (Oita) and the Hizen no Kuni Fudoki (Saga) survive, but not whole.

The Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki and a few fudoki reached us, but had all of them been kept, we could surely have drawn a far richer picture of ancient Japan, because the fudoki project set down in writing the memory of fudo, which differed from land to land.

The fudoki project, by contrast, was an official undertaking of the court, and it rested mainly on five items: changing the names of provinces, districts and villages to "good characters" with auspicious meanings; listing local products; recording the fertility of the soil; giving the origins of the names of mountains, rivers and fields; and gathering the oral traditions of the elders. … But I think the fudo of each province was compiled for something more: as vital evidence of the origins of the ancient clans bound up with the court. Those origins were scattered across the land, and the rich memory in each clan's own traditions was a legitimacy of authority that nothing could erase.

In sum, the fudoki speak of "kuni." The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki speak of "shima." The Kojiki sways between kuni and shima, while the Nihon Shoki speaks only of shima. … It is hard to read, but if we look not at the state or the people as a single space but from place, the essence comes into view. Fudo keeps the memory of place and is the only ground from which to speak of it.

What matters is that fudo is not an account of wind and soil in the scientific sense. It is a "device for transmitting memory," stored by those who came before, and it starts to work only when you take in a wind that has not changed for thousands of years and tread the soil. I believe fudo is Japan's true capital and the ground of being Japanese.

The Izumo no Kuni Fudoki opens with a remarkable tradition absent from both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki: the Kunibiki myth, or "land-pulling" myth. In it, an Izumo deity corresponding to the Kojiki's Okuninushi (Onamuchi) sees that the land of Izumo is too narrow and pulls in pieces of other regions by rope, stitching them together to form a wider realm.

In the Izumo Fudoki, however, the record that gathered the traditions of Izumo itself, something strange happens.

The name Okuninushi never appears, not even once. From beginning to end the god is called Ame-no-shita-tsukurashishi Okami, the Great God Who Made All Under Heaven, or Onamochi, and neither the famous White Hare of Inaba nor his trials in the Land of Roots is told at all.

The primordial god of Izumo is Susanoo, whom the myths cast as the younger brother of Amaterasu. Yet in the scenes of the Izumo Fudoki where Susanoo appears, there is not a single line about his famous slaying of the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi. He appears only once, and very briefly, in the township of Susa in Iishi District.

There Susanoo declares that this land is small but a good place, and that he will therefore not attach his name to trees or stones. Having said so, he settles his own spirit in this land and establishes the rice fields of Osusada and Kosusada. I believe this passage is the prototype of Japanese faith.

Not to trees, and not to stones. What the name attaches to is the place. The god himself is declaring that a name is something generated in a place, and right after that, the text records that he set down his spirit and established the fields.

In fact, a fragment of the Iyo Province Fudoki records that the god who dwells on Mishima is named Oyamatsumi, also called the Great God Watashi. "Wata" is also an ancient word for the sea, and this god has been worshipped as a god of the great ocean and of voyaging. In the world of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, Watatsumi appears separately from Oyamatsumi. This suggests that "wata" was, in the earliest times, some concept connected to the sea, and personally I think that the god of the mountains and the god of the sea may have been inseparable.