Marebito: The Visitor From Across the Sea

Shinobu Orikuchi, the folklorist, studied the Marebito, the visiting gods of the ancient world, and in the course of that research he showed that the gods originally appeared from the sea. Yet the gods did not always come from the sea. In later ages, they came down from the mountains, and in more abstract conceptions, they descended from the heavens, changing their nature as time went on.

In the history of changing pottery styles, attention tends to fall on the vessels themselves, above all the ones named National Treasures, but we must not forget that behind every spread of a style there was always contact between people. In the Jomon period, this meant encounters between different peoples, and because it bears directly on the origins of the Marebito, it deserves careful attention.

When people hear the phrase "visiting gods from the sea," they almost inevitably picture immigrants arriving from abroad. Visiting gods did come from the continent, the Korean Peninsula, and Oceania, it is true. At the same time, the archipelago of that era was a plural world in which each place was home to a different people, so contact across the sea may have created the very prototype of the visiting god.

A marebito is an outsider—a stranger. In its original sense, the word refers to an other who possesses powers and skills the host lacks: what in Japan is called kami (神), as distinct from the Western "god." To the host, the marebito brings what is absent in the host himself, and from that encounter an inevitable tension arises.

In ancient village communities, marebito were visitors arriving from the far reaches of the sea or down from the mountains—realms regarded as the otherworld. Bearing what the community lacked, they always came at appointed seasons, were welcomed and feasted by the villagers as hosts, and, by an unspoken rule, always departed once their season was done. In return for this welcome, the marebito drew on skills beyond the villagers' reach, performing rites such as pacifying the spirits of nature. Though the custom has now almost entirely vanished, right up until the 1960s diverse marebito traditions survived across Japan, preserving ancient memories in the form of local festivals.

Out of years of vast research, what Orikuchi seized upon and placed at the core of his thought was the marebito. A marebito is a numinous, awe-inspiring presence that visits a village community from an otherworld beyond the sea or the mountains — an otherworld conceptualized in Japan since antiquity as tokoyo (常世), the timeless realm beyond. To a parched, stagnant community, the marebito brings fresh vitality and blessing, yet may equally bring destructive upheaval or calamity: an absolute other before whom one stands in awe. In plain terms, the marebito was a god.

What matters most here is that the marebito was never tamed by the logic of settled society; it always arrived wrapped in an outside wind, existing precisely to stir up the stale air of the interior. And its most decisive trait of all lay in the custom that whenever a marebito visited, it invariably went back where it came from. A marebito does not settle. It comes on the premise that it will leave. That dynamic — arriving with departure built in from the start — is what I am convinced forms the true shape of nomadology.

The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi called the deities who came to this country once or several times a year from Tokoyo across the sea tokoyogami (常世神), gods of Tokoyo, and argued that the ancestors of the Japanese held just such a faith in visiting gods. What is most vital in Orikuchi's insight is his point that the earliest prototype of Japanese faith was a god who came from beyond the sea, and that only later did this take the shape of gods descending from the mountains or the sky. Seen in this light, the "gods who depart and never return" in ancient myth look like an early expression of the visiting-god idea: a deity arrives from another world such as Tokoyo, completes a task, and goes home to his or her own realm. To me, this suggests something more than mere myth—it hints at the lived history of ancient Japan, an island country ringed by the sea and lying close to China and the Korean peninsula.

On the surface, these myths of "gods who never return" have a lonely air about them, yet they speak eloquently of the ancient Japanese worldview. Put the other way around, it is precisely because the gods depart that the people of each land have accumulated a long history of holding festivals to pray for their return, offering prayers and rites for the pacification of spirits. And even the gods who left the living world in myth were believed to watch over this country from Yomi or Tokoyo, or in spiritual form, and are worshiped in diverse ways across the archipelago. Izanami, for instance, is enshrined in Kumano in Wakayama and in Izumo in Shimane; Toyotamahime rests in Toyotamahime Shrines in various regions, her spirit at times divided into distinct aspects and suggestively enshrined in different places. Even when a god seems never to return, in other words, that god changes form, changes place, and goes on engaging with human beings—and that may be one reason why, for the Japanese, the distance between human beings and the gods has always felt so remarkably small.

What mattered to the people of ancient Japan was not that a god remain forever at their side, but that the god arrive at the proper time and depart when the time was right. Through that cycle, they believed, the harmony of nature and society was sustained. In time, this would grow into the "visiting gods" who arrive only at specific, appointed seasons of the year—and it is here that the concept of the god known as the marebito steps onto the stage.

Sukunahikona belongs to no place. Because he belongs nowhere, no one can call his name. Here is the prototype of the god the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi later called the marebito (まれびと). The marebito is a visiting god who comes at a fixed season, takes part in the rites and leaves. Across Japan, the footprints of visiting gods were once the everyday world itself. They have been lost only within the last half-century.

So Onamuchi and Sukunahikona build the country together, but in time Sukunahikona leaves. A visiting god must not remain in a place. What is more, he leaves before the building of the country is finished. He is not allowed to stay long. That is the fate of the one who visits: a being not permitted to remain.