The Land Was Handed Over, Not Taken

The kuniyuzuri, though, holds several layers of history intertwined. Myth does not convey historical fact as such, but it does carry the memory of some history. It rises above any "particular era" and has no linear world of past, present and future. I take myth to be a nonlinear world that compresses history: a single story holds the memory of thousands of years. With that in mind, the first thing to grasp is the name of the myth.

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. And Amaterasu, their sovereign, did not move a single step. The gods sent to negotiate were chosen and dispatched by the amatsukami side. This hints that, when the myths were compiled, there were political reasons why Amaterasu could not be made to act herself. What does it mean? Let us turn to ancient history.

The figure of Takemikazuchi coming down at Inasa no Hama suggests people arriving across the sea. In the myth, Takemikazuchi plants his sword upside down in the surf and demands that Okuninushi cede the land. Okuninushi answers that he will agree if his two sons do. The sons are the gods Kotoshironushi and Takeminakata. I have researched Kotoshironushi extensively, but his origin is lost and I cannot grasp what he was. He was probably a native god of ancient Yamato, the south-central Nara Basin, or of Tokushima, once called the province of Awa. Takeminakata is the principal deity of Suwa Taisha, the ancient shrine in Suwa City, Nagano Prefecture. He is the god of Suwa.

In the myth, Kotoshironushi consents, but Takeminakata challenges Takemikazuchi. This is the first clash between the amatsukami and the kunitsukami. Takeminakata is defeated, flees to Suwa and is confined there. So the kuniyuzuri succeeds. The place the amatsukami built so that Okuninushi could withdraw into seclusion is the origin of Izumo Taisha today. It was anciently called Kizuki Taisha, and the name Izumo Taisha came later. When the building began, the amatsukami appointed Amenohohi, the first envoy, to be responsible for its rites. He later became the ancestral deity of a clan, and through it the line leads to the family of chief priests at Izumo Taisha now. Ancient shrines have origins of this astonishing scale.

But, as I said, myth compresses thousands of years of history, and this whole tale does too. Events from several eras are folded into one, and a complex, plural world is handed down as a single story. 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. The Jomon were partly settled but were basically seasonal hunter-gatherers, and their world was the mountains and the sea. For the Jomon, who took in the seasons' bounty fully, the vast reed plains of the archipelago, mostly wetland, were not good places to live, since they gave no natural harvest. The Yayoi were different. Their lives rested on fields of millet, tubers and vegetables, and they had the skill to clear land. What was outside the Jomon living sphere was inside the Yayoi's. For the Yayoi, who had lost their homeland and traveled far, the reed plains the Jomon had left untouched were the right place for a new beginning.

A look at several archaeological datasets shows the Yayoi spreading across the archipelago by threading through the gaps in the Jomon living sphere. Whether they negotiated over use of the reed plains I cannot say, but the picture that emerges is at least one of peaceful coexistence. In the process each influenced the other's customs. The Jomon took up farming in part, and the Yayoi received the bounty of mountain and sea. To settled Yayoi, mobile tribes like the Jomon became gods who appeared at certain times of year.

What we should consider here is the tale of the "Transfer of the Land" (kuniyuzuri) in myth. It comes from the story in which Okuninushi, the god of today's Izumo Taisha, who ruled a huge sphere belonging to Izumo with Izumo at its head, was required to cede his land to the party of the newly arrived Amaterasu. Though myth does not say so, it is very likely that after the Transfer of the Land, the people of Izumo, their hegemony in decline, scattered to many regions. This is not merely my own guess. Place names across Japan, old records, the deities and traditions of shrines all hint at this event, which could be called both myth and history.

Okuninushi, the deity of Izumo Taisha, is the "master of the great land," a figure equal to a powerful king of ancient times who bound together a composite alliance of tribes. He also made alliances through marriage and brought tribes across the country into submission, so the remnants of Izumo belief along the Chikugo may, traced back to their origin, carry an old memory that Izumo powers had relations with many parts of Kyushu, or that people flowed here after the Transfer of the Land.

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.

The lands drawn in to form that coast include the shoreline of Shimane Prefecture around Izumo, the Oki Islands, and part of the Noto Peninsula — along with, most intriguing of all, a stretch of the southeastern Korean peninsula. What such a myth conveys is how deeply ancient Izumo was bound to every one of those shores.