Mountain Gods and Sea Gods Were One

Now, every time I visit Omishima, there is a shrine I always pay my respects at. It is Oyamazumi Shrine. It is one of the ancient shrines recorded in both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, but at some point I began to feel puzzled by something. The god enshrined at Oyamazumi Shrine, the guardian of this island, is Oyamatsumi, a god of mountains.

Thinking about it plainly, Omishima is an island floating in the Seto Inland Sea. Why is a god bound up with mountains enshrined here? Moreover, this shrine is the head shrine of the Oyamazumi and Mishima shrines venerated all over the country, which means this faith began on Omishima. From an island off the coast of the Seto Inland Sea, the source of mountain-god worship was born and then spread across the nation.

I could not solve this riddle however many times I visited the shrine, but when I turn time back to the distant past, it becomes clear that Omishima was once an entirely different world.

It was a mountain.

Long ago, before sea levels rose with the Jomon transgression, from roughly 80,000 to 15,000 years ago, the Seto Inland Sea did not exist and is thought to have been a vast grassland connected to the mainland of Honshu.

So if we trace the worship of Oyamazumi back to its origin, we can say that this sensibility came to dwell in the form of a "mountain god." Even after the Seto Inland Sea took shape through the Jomon transgression, Omishima, now an island, remained the matrix of the mountain god, a history I find quite fascinating. And to me, this faith seems to have set other gods spreading as well. The gods of Japan cannot be pinned down as one; they appear in many layers of time, embracing every kind of layered interpretation.

In fact, a fragment of the Iyo Province Fudoki records that the god who dwells on Mishima is named Oyamatsumi, also called the Great God Watashi. "Wata" is also an ancient word for the sea, and this god has been worshipped as a god of the great ocean and of voyaging. In the world of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, Watatsumi appears separately from Oyamatsumi. This suggests that "wata" was, in the earliest times, some concept connected to the sea, and personally I think that the god of the mountains and the god of the sea may have been inseparable.

The god of the sea and the god of the mountains. When we turn our eyes to this rift, we come one step closer to the sensibility of those who came before us.

Venturing from Aoshima into the mountainous interior of Miyazaki, one soon realizes that Yamasachihiko cannot be understood as a simple polarity between sea and mountain—the legendary struggle of Umisachi and Yamasachi. The myth tells of Yamasachihiko’s ultimate victory, yet shrines dedicated to his defeated brother, Umisachihiko, are virtually nowhere to be found. There is, however, one exception: Shiodake Shrine, tucked away in the deep interior of Miyazaki. That a sea deity should be venerated as the principal kami in a mountain sanctuary is remarkable.

Although the myth records Umisachihiko’s defeat and suggests that Yamasachihiko gained dominion over the sea as well, the enshrinement of the sea god deep in the mountains points to an older cultural bedrock. What the myth of the two brothers preserves is an undivided worldview (hi-bunri no sekaikan) in which sea and mountain were not yet separated. That primal memory survives beneath the shrine's geography and rituals, reflecting a time before tribes drew hard boundaries between coast and uplands.

I sense a common thread among the lands connected with the Kuroshio. It is the possibility that the sea peoples were not set apart as beings of the sea but were a primordial group who also held a faith in the mountains. … If anything, it looks as though "the mountain god" were enshrined by fishermen.

At the cape at the tip of the Ashizuri Peninsula, too, a small shrine to "the mountain god" remains, and there as well fishermen have left many messages of thanks for their catch; almost everyone who keeps it is connected with fishing. In this way the sea and the mountains were never really separate; there is no doubt they existed as a single sphere. Japan is a country of the sea and also a country of mountains, and I feel we must not forget this view of their inseparability.

Though this custom has died out today, until a hundred years ago it was practiced in many regions, and there are traces of its having been carried on in part even into the twenty-first century.

Even judging from the fact that the first person to take a folkloric interest in this strange faith of offering the sea-dwelling okoze to the mountain god was Kunio Yanagita, the founder of Japanese folklore studies, we can see how deeply the faith surrounding the okoze captivated scholars as an object of inquiry from the earliest days of the field.

When we look at the okoze from this angle, one possibility is that in order to win a rich harvest of mountain bounty from a jealous mountain goddess, people tried to set her mind at ease and humor her by showing or giving her an ugly creature. The symbol of that was the okoze—yet if that alone were the reason, a creature living in the mountains should have sufficed. Here I sense the hidden history of the movement of tribes in ancient Japan connecting sea and mountain.

So it is hard to see in present shrines the primal nature faith before shrines appeared, but at the famous Omiwa Shrine in the south of Nara Prefecture, the mountain behind it, Mount Miwa, is still regarded as the divine body, and a primal style of worship remains in which one has no main hall and prays directly to the mountain across the worship hall. I too visit Omiwa Shrine several times a year.

Its chief deity, Omononushi, dwells in the mountain itself, and worship is offered to the mountain from the hall of worship. In present-day Shinto, this form of worship is considered unusual, but because a small number of shrines with the same form still survive in various parts of Japan, the faith of Omiwa Shrine is better understood as a trace of the rifts and the points of mingling between different eras. What I especially want to look at is the custom of calling the ascent of Mount Miwa not tozan, mountain climbing, but Tohai, climbing in worship.

Tohai is tozan with the "mountain" taken out. Within this idea lies the decisive fault line between the Edo period and everything after Meiji.

Many people today enjoy mountain climbing as a hobby, but originally the Japanese did not climb mountains at all.