Usa Jingu and Hachiman: A Faith of the Sea

To unravel the ancient history of Usa Jingu, the first place I visited was Nata no Miya. Nata no Miya, on the coast in the southeast of the Kunisaki Peninsula, is held in the secret tradition of Usa Jingu to be where its deity first descended. Offshore from Nata no Miya a torii stands on a small rocky outcrop, and the place is called "Ichikishima." It is tied to the worship of Ichikishimahime, one of the three goddesses enshrined at Munakata Taisha in Munakata, Fukuoka Prefecture, which holds the highest rank of deity, and it has long been revered as the place where Hime Okami, Usa Jingu's deity (a name for the three Munakata goddesses together), first descended.

Above all, the place faces the entrance to the Hayasui Strait that I wrote of yesterday, and it has an excellent position: from the beach one can see, even from flat ground, all the way to Cape Sada at the western tip of Shikoku and to Saganoseki in Oita, which I visited yesterday. In ancient times, powers going south through the Hayasui Strait must have stopped at this Ichikishima and dealt with the local tribe, and from there gone on to Oita City and Saganoseki, and further to Miyazaki, Satsuma, and the Ryukyus.

That the Usa Jingu side holds that Hime Okami first landed at Nata on the Kunisaki Peninsula and later moved to Usa suggests that this goddess may be of southern origin. If she had come from the north, from the Korean Peninsula and the like, as seen from Kyushu, she would have passed Okinoshima first. Here lies the trace of the complex activity of the immigrant people who carried ancient Japan's sea traffic, the sea tribes. It means that layered sea routes existed.

The place name "Kunimi" remains in this Kunisaki area, meaning the place where a newly advancing power looked around from a high hill or mountain to judge whether the land was fit to rule. As for the route by which Hime Okami advanced, given the oracle of Usa Jingu, it seems recorded as a "trace of coming north from the south," not as coming down from the Korean Peninsula via Himeshima to Nata no Miya. That the very name Himeshima is tied directly to goddess worship is also notable, and the island's name appears in the Kojiki and elsewhere.

At present Hime Okami at Usa Jingu is said to be the goddess worship of the sea tribes of the Munakata side in Fukuoka (the Genkai Sea), known as the three Munakata goddesses, but to say it plainly, this is a later alteration, and the old layer derives from a goddess worship that advanced from the Ariake Sea, not the Genkai. Taken together, an ancient route emerges that went inland up the Chikugo from the Ariake Sea and out to Oita, with Hita and Ukiha at its key points, and it appears that this was a quite important region before the history of the emperors opened in Yamato.

Usa Jingu stands in a place rich in spirit, facing the Kunisaki Peninsula and the Suo Sea. Known as the head shrine of all Hachiman shrines, it presides over roughly 4,800 of them across the country, more than for any other deity. Even Inari shrines, the second most numerous, come to only about 2,700, which shows how widely Hachiman worship spread through Japan.

Hachiman is read both as "Hachiman" and as "Yahata" or "Yawata," and the deity originated as a foreign god who came over from Silla on the Korean Peninsula. Hachiman worship spread so rapidly because, in the eighth century, when Emperor Shomu's project to build the Great Buddha of Todaiji had stalled, the Great God Hachiman of Usa delivered an oracle declaring that he would lead all the gods of the land in support of the work, and the Buddha was then completed without mishap.

This suggests that Chuai and Jingu symbolized not single clans but groups that already bound several clans together, and that the existence of Ojin holds the decisive moment when, for the first time, several groups with different roots became one. Immigrant, naturalized, and native clans had taken their first step toward building a single community.

The epicenter of this new age lay mainly in Kawachi in Osaka and in the western part of the Nara Basin. There, groups with different homelands, bloodlines, languages, customs, cultures, and technologies tried to bind themselves into one. The most successful of them, the one that rose above the rest, was the power of Kawachi, in what are now Habikino, Fujiidera, and Kashiwara, symbolized as Emperor Ojin.

Not only for the imperial family but for all of us Japanese, this was the epicenter where different roots mingled, and it holds an important place in the origins of our people. The ancestors who carried that memory later created the Great God Hachiman by fusing foreign gods together, and then fused into it Emperor Ojin, their symbolic great king. As their descendants moved to every corner of the country, they carried this worship, this memory, with them, until Hachiman became the most widely worshipped deity in the land.