Yomi Was Not First a Land of the Dead

This land of Yomi is set in Japanese myth as the primal position of the other world, but interpretation of the other world always changes as it is regulated by the age.

The concept of the other world is generally thought of as the land of the dead. But this interpretation is not the historically universal concept of the other world. It rests strongly on an understanding reinterpreted by the kokugaku scholars who rose from the middle to the later Edo period, and it was not originally told as a land of the dead. That we can accept this view has to do with how our views of life and death have come close to the same level as the people of today, but originally the concept of the other world was not told as a world of the dead. It was a world of the living. The shift from this world of the living to a world of the dead was shocking, as a question of the Japanese heart.

A new interpretation that tied "the other world = the land of the dead" was deeply connected with Nakatsune Hattori (1757-1824), a disciple of Norinaga Motoori (1730-1801), who led the rise of kokugaku. … Motoori, who saw this as a problem, spent more than thirty years completing the Kojikiden, a thorough interpretation of the Kojiki, and this became the starting point of Kojiki studies in Japan. Study of the Kojiki began in earnest only after over a thousand years from its completion.

Hattori, the disciple who inherited this line of Kojiki study, developed his teacher's interpretation in his own way and unfolded a worldview of the Kojiki. The text that symbolizes it is the Sandaiko. The book caused fierce debate among the kokugaku scholars of the time because Hattori interpreted from the viewpoint of Western astronomy. He took the Kojiki again as the wisdom of the ancients telling how the universe came to be, brought into it Western scientific ideas that had been partly imported, and developed it as a cosmology.

It was because Hattori showed Motoori the making of the universe, and the origin of how things come to be, which Motoori could not grasp himself. So the Sandaiko was published as an appendix to the Kojikiden, read by many readers and formed the base of an age. Under Hattori's thinking the worldview of the Kojiki is set into the dimensions "heaven, earth, spring": "heaven = the heavenly world," … In plain terms, the three-layer structure of heavenly world, earthly world and underworld was taken as the truth of the universe, and on the logic that the other world lies underground, the other world the Kojiki draws was understood as an underworld where the dead dwell. We should take care that this three-layer structure was assembled from a new set of values born in an age almost at the edge of the modern, and does not hold for earlier ages.

The most famous of them all comes from the creation myth known as the kuniumi (国生み), the "birth of the land." When the goddess Izanami gives birth to the fire god, she is mortally burned and departs for Yomi, the land of the dead. … But Izanami answers, "I have already eaten of the hearth of Yomi, and so I cannot return." … In the end, Izanami never returns to the world of the living, and the two gods are never reunited.

What this myth expresses is the ancient Japanese taboo of the food of the dead: once you taste what belongs to Yomi, you can never come back to the world of the living. Izanami becomes, quite literally, the first god never to return, remaining thereafter in the underworld as Yomotsu Okami, the Great God of Yomi.

And above all, Okuninushi himself—the deity enshrined at Izumo Taisha and the central figure of the Izumo myths—is a crucial god who in the end vanishes from the visible world. Defeated in the yielding of the land by the gods led by Amaterasu, Okuninushi sets a condition: "I shall go into hiding in the unseen realm; in exchange, build for me a great palace and worship me there." Once the transfer of the land is settled, Okuninushi withdraws as promised into the unseen world, concealing himself forever in the realm known as Tokoyo or Yumei, the hidden world, and never again shows himself directly among the living. Thus Okuninushi becomes a god who has left the earth, worshiped at Izumo Taisha in spirit alone.

The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi called the deities who came to this country once or several times a year from Tokoyo across the sea tokoyogami (常世神), gods of Tokoyo, and argued that the ancestors of the Japanese held just such a faith in visiting gods. What is most vital in Orikuchi's insight is his point that the earliest prototype of Japanese faith was a god who came from beyond the sea, and that only later did this take the shape of gods descending from the mountains or the sky. Seen in this light, the "gods who depart and never return" in ancient myth look like an early expression of the visiting-god idea: a deity arrives from another world such as Tokoyo, completes a task, and goes home to his or her own realm.

One of the great rewards of this crossing was realizing how much clearer the otherworlds of Japanese myth and folklore — the spirit world, the netherworld, and Yomi, the land of the dead — become when you look at Japan from the sea.

Even more intriguing is a view advanced in ethnological research, one that holds a deep interest for me as well: that the sea peoples and the mountain peoples of ancient Japan were not originally separate at all. The sharp division between those whose domain was the sea and those whose domain was the mountain may be no more than a later reading; in earlier times, people based along the coast may also have lived in the mountains, moving between the two in a regular cycle.