Koto: Word and Deed Were One

Yet in those days, a plural world lived within the single sound "koto." The sense that koto is both "word" [言] and "deed" [事] gave rise in myth to Hitokotonushi, the god of the word, and Kotoshironushi [事代主神], the god of the deed. What is intriguing is that the two gods are rooted side by side.

In the mountain range that rises along the border between Osaka and Nara, Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine stands at the foot of Mount Katsuragi, and Kamotsuba Shrine stands on the plain below it. … Hitokotonushi is enshrined at Katsuragi Hitokotonushi Shrine, and Kotoshironushi at Kamotsuba Shrine. The two gods of "koto" live together side by side, and in that very arrangement I seem to see the sensibility that the ancient Japanese had grasped.

Earlier, in the Manyo era spanning the late seventh to the late eighth century, poets had put forward a fascinating concept: kotodama (言霊).

Kotodama rejects the primacy of the written character—the signified—and calls forth the signifier from sound itself.

Indeed, Kojiki, Japan's oldest book, completed in 712, was originally composed from a standpoint that prized kotodama. Kojiki was transmitted through oral recitation (shoju), setting script aside.

Faith in sound even took the form of a deity: Hitokotonushi Shrine in Katsuragi, Nara Prefecture, enshrines the god of kotodama.

At a time when written characters brought by Sinicization were flooding the court, a renewed emphasis on sound—a return to sound—arose as a restorationist movement. People knew that when things are fixed in writing, spirituality is lost.

Still, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki present Hitokotonushi [一言主神], who dwells at the foot of Mount Katsuragi, as a god, and the belief that this god is the ancestral deity of Kotodama remains strong to this day. The ancestors of the Japanese, who originally had no need of a written culture, conveyed the world to one another through sound, or rather through vibration, and so they shared the idea that the gods were reflected in sound itself.

Who, then, presided over this faith in "koto"? The answer still handed down today is the Katsuragi clan, a lineage wrapped in mystery.

What makes this region difficult is that it has become layered, because one clan after another replaced its predecessors. The typical example is the way the names of the two shrines that honor the two gods of "koto" begin differently, one with "Katsuragi" and the other with "Kamo." This preserves the traces of the new Kamo clan (賀茂氏, also written 加茂氏 or 鴨氏) settling over the area around the time of the Katsuragi clan's fall and in the ages that followed, and it is possible that the Kamo, a rising clan of immigrant origin, inherited the legacy of the Katsuragi.