Shrines of the Sea Road

At Munakata Taisha, the seat of the Munakata clan, a goddess is enshrined on each of three islands within the sacred precincts: Tagorihime at Okitsu-miya on Okinoshima, Tagitsuhime at Nakatsu-miya on Oshima, and Ichikishimahime at Hetsu-miya on the Kyushu side. … As I read it, this arrangement of three shrines is more than a layout of sacred ground; it preserves, in stages, the memory of the sea lane from the Korean Peninsula to Munakata. Voyagers called at each island in turn, performing misogi (禊) — ritual purification in water — at every stop before finally coming ashore at the Munakata seat. Along the ancient sea road there was a custom of "three purifications," and only those who had washed away every trace of defilement from a foreign land could merge with the god of the place and be received as kin. … That spiritual kinship survives in the three-shrine structure of Munakata Taisha today, and Okinoshima, the site of the first purification, remains a forbidden island where ordinary entry is barred.

Known as the faith of the Three Goddesses of Munakata, this worship spread across the archipelago, leaving major shrines such as Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Prefecture and Enoshima Shrine in Kanagawa Prefecture along the trail of the Munakata clan's movements. The presence of these three goddesses throughout Japan shows that the Munakata were not mere gatekeepers of the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu, but a seafaring clan that ranged widely along the maritime routes.

At Shikanoumi Shrine, the seat of the Azumi clan, the three deities are enshrined not across separate islands, but across three layers of the sea itself — soko (底), naka (中), and uha (表), the depths, the middle waters, and the surface.

Deified as Sokotsuwatatsumi, Nakatsuwatatsumi, and Uhatsuwatatsumi, these three gods are explicitly named in myth as the ancestral deities of the Azumi. Watatsumi, their progenitor, is the great god of the sea in the mythological tradition, and the very name Azumi (阿曇) is thought to be a contraction of the ancient word amatsumi (海津見), "spirit of the sea," binding clan name and deity into one. … Just as with the Munakata, the triad preserves in three stages the memory of the sea crossing from the Korean Peninsula to Shikanoshima.

At Hayasuihime Shrine, a rarely seen deity is enshrined: the deities of the great land and sea (Otsuchi Oonabara moromoro no kami). This god has as its archetype the natural gods that people who went out to sea in ancient times always revered, and was later deified as Hayasuihime and became an object of worship. A priestess, the woman chief who led the Amabe, performed rites to calm the god of the Hayasui Strait, known as a perilous passage, so that no disaster would befall, and through this the tribes moved about the Bungo Channel.

According to the myth, when Emperor Jimmu passed through the Hayasui Strait during the Eastern Expedition toward Yamato, women of the sea of that place received from a great octopus at the bottom of the sea a sacred sword that calms the tide, and offered it to Jimmu, so that he was able to cross the dangerous strait safely, and this is the reason for the worship. It tells of one form of a god in whom nature worship and practical gain are joined.

When we put this into practice, the key turns out to be the princess deities. Among those I have pursued so far on the Kyushu side, for example, are Hayasuihime of the Hoyo Strait, Toyotamahime of Aoshima, Ahiratsuhime of Nichinan, and the goddess of Kushira worshiped by the Hayato of Osumi. Standing on the actual ground of each of them brings the fact that the Ama peoples moved along the Kuroshio into much sharper focus.

Yakurahime appears in neither the Kojiki nor the Nihon Shoki. She is a goddess entirely particular to Awa. What matters here, though, is that "divine names shift" along the Kuroshio.

The real nature of Sumiyoshi Taisha cannot be understood from the image we now hold of it, "a famous tourist shrine in Osaka." It was probably the place of great authority that those who came by ship from the sea met first, a kind of "barrier gate" that decided whether they could land. … Sumiyoshi Taisha, in other words, very likely served as an international hub in antiquity.

From the standpoint of topography, though, Sumiyoshi Taisha sits at the southern end of the Uemachi Plateau as the "front gate" of Osaka Bay, and a strong force of sea peoples had settled there. In other words, in the past one could not enter the Kawachi side, the interior of the Yamato River basin, without passing through Sumiyoshi Taisha. … The people who enshrined the god of Sumiyoshi Taisha were the Sumiyoshi, one of the ancient sea peoples. Around the Genkai Sea, the ancient gateway of northern Kyushu, there were three major sea peoples: the Munakata of Munakata Taisha, the Azumi of Shikanoshima, and the Sumiyoshi. They left traces all over the archipelago, but it was the Sumiyoshi who took the gateway to Kawachi and Yamato.

Today there is no sea near Hochigai Shrine, so it has become a god of directions on land. In antiquity the surroundings were sea, and I believe the oldest layer of Hochigai Shrine held the character of a "god who shows the direction at sea." For people coming from the sea, the area around Hochigai Shrine was a great reference point, a place where they could feel they had come within one step of entering Kawachi. From there they went on to Sumiyoshi Taisha, then up the inland river courses toward Kawachi and the Yamato River, and I think this was the route they took. In the ancient topography Hochigai Shrine stood at the tip of a cape, and Sumiyoshi Taisha could have been seen from it.

When I visited my grandmother's house, I used to worship at Hochigai Shrine, an important shrine of the place. Behind it lies a mound called the tomb of Emperor Hanzei, and farther back lies the Daisen Kofun, the tomb of Emperor Nintoku, the famous giant mound.