The Invisible Root: Reading the Lineage of the Kami

I keep making my own journeys into ancient history and the roots of my ancestors, and I combine that with the springs when I look into things. This is because something comes into view only from such an integrated standpoint. It is what I call the genealogy of the gods.

"The genealogy of the gods" may sound strange. I consider it as important as the roots of one's own ancestors: if ancestors are the visible roots, the gods are the invisible roots. Let me state my own view in some detail. Unless you understand this genealogy, then standing before the countless shrines of Japan, you cannot judge which shrines you may worship at and which you may not. Not every shrine is a shrine to worship at. I begin by looking at the main deity enshrined there, the deities enshrined alongside, and the traditions handed down, and by judging whether they are compatible with my own genealogy of the gods.

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.

There are many exceptions. A god who was originally a kunitsukami may later be absorbed into the amatsukami line if he played a part in the origin of the emperors, and an amatsukami who later rebelled may be turned into a kunitsukami. To tell these apart, then, I need a many-sided understanding of the age of the gods grounded in the Kojiki, and I keep reading it by integrating my own findings.

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. They came over and opened up the land. Yakami-hime, in other words, is a descendant of this immigrant tribe, the Yakami clan.

According to her, the tradition that Yakami-hime descended from an immigrant tribe has long been handed down in the village.

As I also wrote yesterday, in the local tradition the roots of Yakami-hime (八上比売), the priestess of Inaba Province (now Tottori Prefecture), lie in an immigrant tribe. This is not generally told, and I myself did not know it until I spoke yesterday with an elderly local woman at the shrine. Yet as I go on investigating in detail, what comes into view is an ancient Japan made up of a diversity no one imagines, and that is the fascinating part.

One day, word spreads of a young and beautiful princess named Yagamihime in the neighboring land of Inaba (present-day Tottori Prefecture), and the brother gods set out in competition to win her hand.

In gratitude, the white hare foretold that it would be Onamuchi who wed Yagamihime — and passing over all his brothers, she chose Onamuchi as her husband.

Over the years I have traveled around Japan and visited nearly a thousand shrines. Yet however much I studied Japanese mythology and history beforehand, the Kojiki above all, whenever I saw the names of the enshrined deities and the shrine histories in each place, I struggled to grasp at once which lineage a deity belonged to and in which scenes it appeared.

The idea actually comes from the tree structures used in databases of maternal and paternal genetic lineages. I wanted to build the genealogy of the gods like a genetic tree. The genealogical charts of the gods published by Kokugakuin University and others are far too complex and are not optimized for smartphones, so they are not practical.

The app covers each enshrined deity's lineage and its parents, siblings, and marriages in the myths, and, with the Kojiki as its base, my own database brings in the deities enshrined at Japanese shrines, including those of the Nihon Shoki, the Sendai Kuji Hongi, and the Kogo Shui, great figures of history, and the gods of local tradition.