Kunitsukami: The Gods of Places, Smothered Under Concrete

Above all, the important concepts the Kojiki records, amatsukami and kunitsukami, are basic. They belong to the genealogy of the gods that rests on the myths. Put briefly, the amatsukami are the gods enshrined by tribes who came from overseas, and the kunitsukami are the gods enshrined by tribes native to the land.

Two concepts are essential to understanding this myth: the amatsukami (天つ神) and the kunitsukami (国つ神). … Before Chinese characters came into use, the sound "ama" in ancient Japan was a common word for the sea, and it belonged to the sea peoples.

If we remember the age when "ama" meant the sea, the kunitsukami are the native gods, as against gods from outside, most likely the gods of the archipelago that go back to the Jomon period.

Today I have come to Higashi-Obama, in western Wakasa.

This route functioned as the main road for carrying Wakasa fish to Kyoto, an inland city that could not get fresh seafood, and in recent years it has become known as the "Mackerel Road" after Wakasa's famous mackerel. Long before that, the fault itself had formed this road.

"Niu" (丹生) is the old name for the red mineral cinnabar, mercury vermilion, and not only in Wakasa: at Mount Koya in Wakayama, also a source of cinnabar, a shrine remains where Niu is deified as a goddess.

Geographically, Wakasahime Shrine stands at the foot, and Wakasahiko Shrine stands 1.5 kilometers south, in the mountains, and the two have long drawn a worship that cannot be separated.

In a nearby coffee shop, some old men were gathered, and I asked them about it. … According to what they told me, from old belief and tradition of the land this god must not be exposed to sunlight, so the rite of moving him began in the evening, and the priests and local parishioners formed a procession at night and walked 1.5 kilometers to Wakasahime Shrine, where they set up a temporary shrine and enshrined him for the time being.

And Amaterasu is an amatsukami (天つ神), while Toyotamahiko and Toyotamahime are kunitsukami. … This cannot be clarified until I investigate Amami and the Ryukyus, but given that old tradition is handed down in Wakasa, the rift between amatsukami and kunitsukami seems to have originated in an event concerning the sea deities.

The kuniyuzuri (国譲り), the "ceding of the land" recorded in Japanese mythology, is a story about Izumo Taisha, the grand shrine in the city of Izumo, Shimane Prefecture. It is also the memory of something that happened in ancient Japan.

It is critical. The story is about ceding the land, not seizing it. The amatsukami did not take the land. It was ceded after negotiation between the amatsukami and the kunitsukami.

My own research has convinced me that the Yayoi who arrived across the sea did not fight the native Jomon over land. The two peoples lived together.

That is why it is a "ceding" and not a seizure, and the myth tells us so plainly.

The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi once made a remark that bears on this. Japanese gods, he said, changed from "visiting gods from the sea" to "visiting gods from the mountains" to "visiting gods from the heavens," and Japan's own faith grew within this three-layered structure.

I saw it once. The kamimukaesai begins at seven in the evening on the dark beach of Inasa, in an ancient world lit only by the bonfires the priests of Izumo Taisha have lit. … In that dreamlike world the gods "come from the sea." They do not "descend from heaven." They "descend from the sea." That Inasa no Hama is where they land carries a memory from a very ancient time.

This morning, for example, I worshiped at a shrine in the mountains of Inaba Province (now eastern Tottori Prefecture). The deity enshrined there is Yakami-hime (八上比売), a goddess of priestesses. She appears in the Izumo myths of the Kojiki, and what interests me is that in the old local tradition the roots of the tribe that enshrined her lie on the continent.

While I was praying at the shrine this morning, I happened to meet an elderly local woman, and in the grounds she taught me a great deal, from old traditions to the customs of the place. According to her, the tradition that Yakami-hime descended from an immigrant tribe has long been handed down in the village.

This is exactly the configuration in which the Kunitsukami, the gods of the land, are enshrined.

Human activity in all its plurality, different in every place, has been held down beneath the earth by something, and so has culture, the air that rises from its accumulation. I see what that something is in concrete.

If what is enshrined there is the Kunitsukami, then what will be asked of us is how to take on their will and carry it into the world.

Considering that Keichu (1640–1701), the founder of Kokugaku, was a priest of the Shingon school that descends from Kukai, it makes sense that the movement began with setting language right.

The transformation took nearly two centuries, but as they kept searching for a state that would open the way between "the underground (Japan)" and "the surface (the foreign)," "restoration" was at last proclaimed with the arrival of Atsutane Hirata. In other words, restoration is not something that can be loudly declared today or tomorrow, without any struggle of thought or trial and error in practice.

Atsutane Hirata's Restoration Shinto is a world in which "Shinto" itself does not exist.

What matters is that the Kuniumi gives birth to shima, but in a highly abstract form. The modern reading assigns all the places above to imperial territory, and that is wrong. They are quite abstract. The emperor had to abstract the idea of shima because there were still a great many native powers across the land that had not yet fully submitted to the court. In truth the history of the imperial house is less an assertion of the legitimacy of imperial hegemony than an accumulation of efforts to bring native powers under imperial shima and somehow unify them. The Nihon Shoki was written to stress that legitimacy, so it shows emperors bravely conquering native forces. The Kojiki is fundamentally different. It shows many tribes beyond the reach of the emperor's shima, who submitted to neither emperor nor court. In the modern age they appear as the matsurowanu (まつろわぬ) gods and the matsurowanu peoples, and their origin lies in the world of the Kojiki.

The old verb matsurofu, no longer used in modern Japanese, meant to refuse submission. In the Kojiki such beings were scorned by the court, so they appear not as personal gods but as animals and the like. Yet those who knew the fudo of the land were not the people who pledged submission and lived in the shima. They were the people who lived in the raw, primal dimension of kuni. The real people of place who lived in kuni were the "gods who do not submit," and the kunitsukami were those who reigned in the position alienated as shima. No clear definition is possible, however. A god like Susanoo, who appears as Amaterasu's brother, moves among the amatsukami, the kunitsukami and the gods who do not submit. The further back toward the ancient stratum, the more native fudo these beings carry.

First, the emperor himself ordered this myth compiled, so it reflects his values and thought. Empress Genmei only carried out the writing down. The origin lies earlier, with the fortieth sovereign, Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686). I regard Tenmu as a rare thinker, and the Kuniumi is best read as reflecting the thought around him. What we can sense here is the moment when the word shima, meaning imperial territory, was alienated from kuni. Shima was born of the alienation of kuni. It did not exist separately from the first. Put another way, the imperial turf, the emperor's territory, could be established only because the kunitsukami, the native powers, already had their places. This is critical. It is why faith in the kunitsukami remains deep in Japan today, and why faith in the emperor, the symbol of the amatsukami, remains deep too. On the archipelago the gods live together, and it is the emperor who presides over that coexistence.

Kuni itself comes from the native powers of the archipelago, as the very pairing of the kunitsukami against the amatsukami shows. When Tenmu led the compilation of traditions fit for a new age, he probably kept kuni out of regard for the ancient clans around him, and alienated shima from kuni to create a new space, in order to lift imperial authority into the heavenly realm. The one most plainly affected by this current was Amaterasu. From Tenmu to his successor Empress Jito, she was made divine as the imperial ancestor, and faith in the Inner Shrine at Ise, where she is enshrined, rose. At the same time, Amaterasu, who had been a native sea deity of Ise, was raised into a god of the heavenly realm. This shift in thought was foreign to the Japan that had gone before, so people who came from China with new ideas may have influenced Tenmu. He is in fact thought to have been strongly influenced by Daoism.

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. The god called Susanoo, then, or rather every one of the gods, has no substance of its own. That is what antiquity looked like.

A name, a spirit, and land that is tilled. What binds them together are the acts of the people who live on that land, and this is how the place name Susa was born. The name of the god becomes the name of the land, and the name of the land becomes the name of the god. Neither comes first, because what generates them both is the living activity of people in a place.

That is how names were generated. Fudo, in other words, is what the names of the gods once were. That is why there are as many names as there are places. Yaoyorozu, the "eight million" gods, is a word for exactly this state of affairs. And every one of those names is true, because when the place differs, the relationship differs.

In 1871, however, as the modern system of shrine ranks was put in place, the shrine name Kizuki Taisha, which named a place, was discarded. The shrine was renamed Izumo Taisha, taking the name of the province of Izumo, the very land that had been ceded to Amaterasu, who had been made the ancestral deity of the imperial line. The name of a place vanished and was replaced by the name of a territory. We have walked in exactly the opposite direction from that declaration, "not on trees or stones will I set my name, but on this land."

What vanished, though, was our way of seeing, not the gods. Even now the Kunitsukami, the gods of the land, dwell in shrines across the country, in Iwa under the name of Iwa, in Miwa under the name of Miwa, and in Susa under the name of Susa. And from beyond the sea, season after season, something still arrives and goes back again. That there are so many names means that there are so many places.

Today Amaterasu is written 天照, which means "illuminating heaven," and this has come to symbolize the worship of "illuminating heaven = the sun." In the old view, though, Amaterasu is rightly written 海照, "illuminating the sea." The sound is the same, but the meaning changed greatly through the characters, a symbolic case. Amaterasu was originally a god worshipped as the "deity who lights the sea" by tribes on the coast of Ise, and had no direct relation to sun worship.

And Amaterasu is an amatsukami (天つ神), while Toyotamahiko and Toyotamahime are kunitsukami. At some point in history, as Amaterasu was being deified, her side influenced the sea-deity worship of the kunitsukami side, and the sea deity of the amatsukami side changed into a god of the heavenly realm and was identified with the sun, so a custom of shunning the sun may have arisen somewhere among the sea deities of the kunitsukami. This cannot be clarified until I investigate Amami and the Ryukyus, but given that old tradition is handed down in Wakasa, the rift between amatsukami and kunitsukami seems to have originated in an event concerning the sea deities.