Okuninushi Has No True Name

We call the principal deity of the great shrine in Izumo by the name Okuninushi. Yet this god has no true name.

The Kojiki lists Onamuchi, Ashiharashikoo, Yachihoko, Utsushikunitama, and finally Okuninushi, and it goes out of its way to add a note that, taken together, he has five names. One of the variant accounts in the Nihon Shoki goes further and adds Omononushi and Okunitama to the list. In the Izumo Fudoki, however, the record that gathered the traditions of Izumo itself, something strange happens.

The name Okuninushi never appears, not even once. From beginning to end the god is called Ame-no-shita-tsukurashishi Okami, the Great God Who Made All Under Heaven, or Onamochi, and neither the famous White Hare of Inaba nor his trials in the Land of Roots is told at all. Move on to Harima, and the protagonist of the Harima Fudoki is Iwa no Okami, a god who appears there as Onamuchi.

The reality is the reverse. The names did not multiply. They were countless from the very beginning, and it is in the process by which they were bundled into a single god that we find the traces of how the divinity called Okuninushi came into being. Two gods were decisively involved in that process, the god who stays and the god who leaves.

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.

To send the gods of her own lineage down into Ashiharanakakuni, Amaterasu asks Okuninushi, the Izumo god who leads the kunitsukami, to cede the great land that contains it. Okuninushi is the principal deity of Izumo Taisha today and one of the oldest gods in Japan. Written 大国主, the name is a title, "the lord who governs the great land," and probably something like a great king of ancient times.

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.

This time I moved around the Noto Peninsula, mountain villages in Nagano, southern to northern Niigata, and the mountains of Aizu-Wakamatsu in Fukushima next to Niigata. In the deities enshrined at shrines and the old traditions of the land, it can be seen that this was from early times the greatest obstacle for other tribes moving north, and that most tribes lacked the strength to go beyond Hokushin-etsu. The god who crossed this barrier was Okuninushi, the deity of Izumo Taisha, which is extremely important for understanding the reality of ancient Japan from the viewpoint of myth, tradition, and enshrined deities.

Along the whole coast of Hokushin-etsu, for example, there are countless traditions of visits by the god of Izumo. The princess he married was Nunakawahime of Itoigawa, in Niigata, and the child of the two was Takeminakata, the deity of Suwa Taisha, inland from Itoigawa. The old reality is hinted at everywhere.

The pantheon enshrined within Tsukuyomi Shrine preserves another faint glimpse of that ancient stratum. Alongside Tsukuyomi, agrarian rice deities were installed in later eras, marking a shift toward agricultural orthodoxy. Far more telling, however, is the secondary enshrinement of Takeminakata and Yasakatome. Takeminakata is the crucial Izumo deity born of Okuninushi and Nunagawahime, queen of Koshi on the Japan Sea coast, and today venerated at Suwa Taisha. Yasakatome is recorded as his consort, yet her presence here suggests that she was originally the indigenous female chieftain who led the local tribe before any Izumo contingent arrived.

In other words, the arrangement reflects an alliance forged when Takeminakata, representing the expanding sphere of Izumo, arrived on the Osumi Peninsula and entered into marriage with Yasakatome, the local leader. The early rise of Tsukuyomi worship thus seems to have been rooted in this tribal alliance, blending lunar divination for farming and fishing with comb ritualism presided over by female shamans. Why Tsukuyomi was granted equal rank with Amaterasu and Susanoo in the court mythologies remains a puzzle, but one clue may lie in the southward movement of these Osumi Jomon tribes, who later pressed into the Kinai and exerted a profound influence on the emergent Yamato state. That tribal force, centered on Osumi, was the Hayato.

Sukunabikona belongs to no place, and because he belongs nowhere, no one can call him by name. Here lies the prototype of the god that Shinobu Orikuchi would later call the Marebito, the visitor who comes from beyond.

The two gods built the land together, but of Sukunabikona's departure the record says only that he climbed a stalk of millet, was flung off, and crossed over to Tokoyo, the eternal land across the sea. A visiting god must not stay in one place. If he stayed, he would become an unmoving god of the place. Only because he leaves can he come again and bring wisdom with him. The very working of going away and returning was the true body of this god.