A God Who Loves the Ugly: The Mountain Goddess, the Matagi and the Bear

As for why the okoze was made an offering to the mountain god, folkloric interpretations until now have focused on the ugliness and strangeness the okoze possesses. According to Japanese folkloric materials, there is a tradition that "the mountain god is fond of things uglier than itself," and in regions where the okoze could not be obtained, eerie-looking land creatures such as door snails, weasels, pit vipers, and caterpillars were called "mountain okoze" (yama-okoze) and offered to the mountain god. While I do not think this focus on outward form is entirely right, it is probably true in part, and such creatures may also have been favorites of the wolves that once lived in Japan.

Yet as I traveled from region to region, I learned that there was a history in which this bounty of the sea, the okoze, was prized for some reason as an offering dedicated to the god of the mountain.

Yanagita gathered diverse oral traditions from across the country and published one work after another, and in 1936 he brought out a study titled "The Mountain God and the Okoze" ("Yama no Kami to Okoze"). In it he cataloged examples of "worshipping the mountain god with an okoze" practiced by the hunters, woodcutters, and falconers who still existed in great numbers across Japan during his lifetime, showing that similar customs were found from Tohoku down to Kyushu.

If this were a custom practiced only in one particular region, it would be another matter, but why did such a strange custom exist on a nationwide scale? It may well be the prime example in which we can feel the traces of cultural transmission through the movement of tribes in a Japanese history still unknown to anyone. Looking closely into the customs and faith surrounding the okoze, in other words, holds the potential to reveal an unseen face of Japanese history.

Almost everywhere across Japan, for some reason, the mountain god has been believed to be a goddess. I myself have continued conversing with elderly locals in region after region, and curiously enough, while they say in unison that "the mountain god is a goddess," for some reason they never speak her name.

Furthermore, as is typical of Japanese faith, in which human beings and gods stand in an exceedingly close relationship, the goddess of the mountain was believed to harbor jealousy, and to be jealous above all of beautiful things and of women.

According to what I heard from someone who hunts in the mountain districts of Tohoku, in former times, during the hunting season when the men went into the mountains, the women in the village neither wore makeup nor dressed their hair, and adorning themselves was taboo. Naturally, women were forbidden to enter the mountains, because it was believed that if a woman entered the mountains, the "mountain god = goddess" would grow jealous, withholding the bounty of the hunt and even bringing on natural disasters such as landslides.

Though it is not widely known, Japan's mountains were once home to many wolves of an endemic species, the Japanese wolf.

By the time Minakata made this report, then, the wolf was already extinct, and he himself probably never had the chance to see one, yet it is a fact that wolves had been worshipped throughout history. And what is important is Minakata's observation that the perspective in which the wolf was worshipped in some quarters as the form of the mountain god was bound up with the okoze faith.

Moreover, why is the Japanese word okoze written with the characters for "tiger fish" (虎魚)? Wolves existed in Japan, but tigers did not. Here, a Chinese influence seems to flicker in and out of view.

Residents across various towns agreed that bears had never appeared within human settlements with such frequency, driven from the mountains as sharp fluctuations in the global climate shrink their natural feeding grounds. Yet climate alone does not explain it.

In the mountains of Akita, it was also once standard practice to keep Akita dogs, but during the postwar economic boom people abandoned them for smaller breeds following trends from Tokyo, altering the landscape completely. The large, muscular Akita was a hunting dog capable of driving off a bear when one drew near; small pets offer no deterrence at all, allowing bears to saunter into villages without fear. Visiting places like Kita-Akita today, one sees virtually no people out on the streets, meaning that for a bear, descending into a settlement poses little risk.

There was a time when overhunting raised fears that bears might go the way of the Japanese wolf, which went extinct in the Meiji era, but today the compounding effects of rural aging and depopulation are causing bear numbers to rebound.

Combined with climate shifts and habitat disruption that push bears beyond their mountain redoubts, people who have lived only in cities are increasingly coming into contact with bears. A friend of mine in northern Tohoku lives in the center of town, yet tells me that bears roam the streets after dark, showing just how routine their presence has become.

Historically, Japan’s mountain reaches were home to specialized hunting communities who culled bears during fixed seasons, keeping their numbers from swelling out of balance. In regions with naturally dense bear populations—Hokkaido, Tohoku, and Nagano Prefecture—a hunting culture spanning thousands of years flourished.

Though contact with bears has been repeated across this archipelago since ancient times, the complete postwar severance of nature from human living spheres has left most people without any resilience toward the wild, and as the routine use of the word "extermination" makes obvious, the ancient sensibility of yaoyorozu (八百万)—the eight million gods—no longer breathes here.

Regarding the brown bears of Hokkaido, historical and archaeological records show that bear hunting was practiced by the Jomon people, by the seafaring Okhotsk culture that arrived from the north, and by the various other groups that shaped the Ainu culture formed around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though discerning pre-Ainu cultures in Hokkaido is notoriously difficult, the Ainu practiced the ritual of iyomante (イヨマンテ), sending the spirit of a sacrificed animal back to the realm of the gods. Edo-period records show that the ritual centered mostly on bears, but earlier still, it may have been performed for marine mammals such as orcas and whales—a hint that the origins of Ainu culture were interwoven with the lives of peoples who crossed the sea.

All this means that anyone entering the mountains must now prepare for a bear encounter far more thoroughly than in the past.

In deep antiquity, when the Japanese archipelago was still connected to the Asian continent, mammoths and other megafauna roamed the land, and bears likely crossed over with them. While the mammoth and the wolf have vanished, bears have coexisted with the ancestors of this archipelago for tens of thousands of years. Today, that coexistence is treated as an intolerable nuisance in the framework of modern life: the bear’s tenure as a god is over, replaced by the status of a pest to be exterminated whenever it threatens human comfort.