CW: Anatomy discussions and scatalogical humor.

Issues in the Heavenly Plain as Susanowo goes up to see his sister, Amaterasu.  This eventually led to the famous story of the Heavenly Rock Cave, and the origin stories of many of the clan deities.

For more information, see https://www.sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-15

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 15: Trouble in Paradise.

So I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and not going too stir crazy right now.  This Coronavirus situation has a lot of us staying at home, right now, and we are no exception here at Sengoku Daimyo HQ.  It put a certain emphasis on part of our story, today, as we discuss one of the OG self-isolators—Amaterasu and her retreat into the Heavenly Rock Cave

Before we get into this one, a quick content warning.  The Japanese chronicles often refer to areas of anatomy that some people consider sensitive topics.  I will do my best to present them in a straightforward manner, without intent to be overly vulgar, but neither shall we get so academic as to avoid the subject.  Human anatomy is natural and we will do our best to treat it as such.

In addition, this particular section has a couple of, shall we say, scatological references as well.

Finally, I want to emphasize that we are dealing with the stories here in the context of the time they were written and what that tells us both about the people who wrote them down and any hints at earlier life and tradition.  This is not an attempt to discuss any particular Shinto beliefs, other than in the context of possibly helping us to make sense of what we are reading.

With that said, let’s get into it.

So of all the deities birthed by Izanagi and Izanami, two seem to shine above the rest—no pun intended—and they dominate the next part of the chronicles.  The first is probably known to many of you:  Amaterasu no Ohokami no Mikoto, the sun goddess.  Her birth takes different forms—in some accounts she is born from the union of Izanagi and Izanami, and in others, she is born after Izanami’s death, through the power of Izanagi himself.  Whatever her origin story, she is immediately recognized as a glorious and wondrous deity and set up to govern the High Plain of Heaven—something that I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that that sovereigns of the 8th century were claiming her as their own, personal ancestral kami, or ujigami .  Meanwhile, she has a brother born about this time:  Susanowo no Mikoto.  Where Amaterasu is beautiful and immediately honored by the gods, Susanowo is wild and tempestuous, with a beard 8 spans long.  He rages and weeps and causes destruction, and so he is eventually exiled to the Nether World.

Now the actual origin story for these deities comes in a few different flavors, but generally they are connected.   Typically there are three kami who are born together—Amaterasu, Susanowo, and Tsukuyomi, the moon god.  We’ll examine a few different accounts of these three kami, their origins, and how they are interrelated with one another, and the rest of the narrative.

In the Nihon Shoki’s main narrative, Izanagi and Izanami intentionally give birth to a kami that would rule the cosmos.  This is the sun goddess, Ohohirume no Muchi, also identified as Amaterasu no Ohokami, or even Amaterasu Ohohirume no Mikoto. They immediately decided that she was too brilliant for the world, and so they send her off to Takama no Hara, the High Plain of Heaven.

Next they create a partner for her—Tsukuyomi, the moon god.  He is created specifically to help her rule in the heavens…  And that is just about it.  He really doesn’t factor into the story much after that.  Well, that’s not quite true, there is one story, but we will get to that in due time.

And I have to admit, despite his lack of presence I find Tsukuyomi intriguing on several different levels.  I mean, obviously the sun and moon go together, that is hard not to see, but the gender choice is interesting.  You see, in much of China, and even the world, the Sun tends to be male—Apollo, Ra, etc. Meanwhile, the moon is often female, likely because of its waxing and waning being compared to women’s menstruation cycles.  In Chinese Yin Yang theories the sun is associated with the yang—fiery, hot, and bright, while the Moon is associated with Yin, the feminine, cold, and dark.  In the Japanese tradition, though, this is precisely the opposite—the Sun is female and the Moon is male.  That would seem to put at least the origins of these stories some time before the wholesale import of Chinese thought and philosophy.

Not only is Tsukuyomi, the moon, male, but his origin story is pretty much exactly the same as Amaterasu’s in most of the variations.  In the Nihon Shoki, he’s explicitly created by Izanagi and Izanami, along with Amaterasu.  In the Kojiki, as well as one of the alternate stories in the Nihon Shoki, they both come about when Izanagi is purifying himself, with Amaterasu being born from his left eye and Tsukuyomi being born from his right.  Sun and moon, as large disks in the sky, certainly could be easily equated with eyes.  In yet another story, they are created from disks or mirrors that Izanagi holds in his left and right hands, respectively. Now, Left and right also have significance in Japanese—the Left was often slightly elevated above the Right, such as the Sadaijin, or Minister of the Left, had slightly more authority and prestige than the Udaijin, the Minister of the Right.  Still, that seems a far cry from what we have here, where Tsukuyomi is basically non-existent and has very little prestige at all...

After both Amaterasu—or Ohohirume, as she is often referred to in this early passage—and Tsukuyomi are born, then, in some of the stories, comes the Leech Child, Hiruko, whose bones never fully form and who still cannot stand by his third year, so he is put adrift, like Moses in a reed basket, though without so much hope that he’ll grow up to be something more—maybe more like the Spartans abandoning deformed children to the wilderness.

Some scholars also see in Hiruko’s name a parallel with that of Ohohirume, or more appropriately “Hirume”.  Whereas “Hirume” is taken to mean “woman of the sun”, could “Hiruko” have originally meant “child of the sun”?  If that were the case, then the association with leeches (also “hiru” in Japanese) may be a false etymology from which the later descriptions were taken.

By the way, this idea that Hiruko is born after Tsukuyomi is part of the main narrative thread in the Nihon Shoki, but many other stories put the Leech Child’s birth closer to the start of the tale, often coming just after Izanagi and Izanami’s first act of intercourse.  It is used in that context to provide an immediate consequence of Izanagi and Izanami’s initial mistake, which was simply to have Izanami speak first, if you recall.  Of course, regardless of where, the child is still placed in a boat and abandoned.

There is one more kami that is often mentioned in this story, and that is the kami known as Susanowo.  Technically his full name is given as Take Haya Susa no Wo no Mikoto.  Susanowo’s origin story takes a variety of paths, but it always comes last of the three.  Reading through the variations of his story is like watching the OVA versus the television run of an anime, which often have wildly different story arcs but the same gist.  The main text of the Nihon Shoki gives no explanation other than he was born.  In the Kojiki, after washing his eyes and producing Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, Izanagi blows his nose, and thus is born Susanowo.  In the version where the sun and moon deities are born from disks or bronze mirrors, Susanowo is instead born from Izanagi looking askance.  No matter what, he doesn’t exactly have a noble entry into the world. 

And it gets better:  he is described as wild and impetuous.  He grows a beard, 8 spans long, almost overnight and then he goes about wailing and making trouble.  This causes no end of trouble for those around him in the land of the Reed Plains, and it is recognized that if he is left alone, he will bring nothing but destruction.

So a few things before we really get into Susanowo’s cycle.  First off, I don’t know if you got this from context, but Amaterasu is the favorite child, here.  She is the sun goddess, and, spoiler alert, she’ll eventually be the one from whom the entire Imperial line descends.  Remember that even Himiko’s name—or possibly title—appears to be a reference to the sun, and she is certainly seen as the head deity of the Yamato lineage.  Even today, most shrines will give her pride of place, even if they are chiefly venerating other kami.

Susanowo, on the other hand, is a wild, earthy god.  Most of the references to him are from Izumo, on the Japan Sea coast, and he is chiefly venerated at Kumano Taisha, in Shimane prefecture—the old Izumo region.  Archaeology confirms that Izumo was its own, independent power base for centuries, and there are indications of conflict over the years between Yamato and Izumo.  I’ve said before that Izumo will likely deserve its own treatment here at some point, but for now let’s just talk about the fact that Izumo was eventually on the losing side of the power struggle between them and Yamato, and it shows in the narrative.  Still, they were too powerful to ignore completely, and many of their stories were clearly brought in and made a part of the official narrative, though taking a back seat to the story of Yamato.  Through these stories, as well as some hints from texts like the Izumo Fudoki and others, we might see hints of some of the political struggles taking place in the context of the mythic narratives, though trying to place them, historically, could be challenging without corroborating evidence.

So anyway, these three children—Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanowo—are given reign over the universe—or at least the universe that is Japan.  They haven’t really acknowledged the rest of the world just yet.  The exact details are a little squishy—Amaterasu is given the Plain of High Heaven, Takama no Hara, certainly, but Tsukuyomi is sometimes set up as her consort overseeing Heaven, and sometimes he is given dominion over the night, but sometimes he is given purview over the ocean—after all, the connection between the moon and the tides would have been obvious to just about anyone.  On the other hand, sometimes it is Susanowo who is associated with the Sea Plain, and sometimes he is associated with the Earthly realm.  It is all a bit confusing, but for the most part it doesn’t play into the story, largely because of his wild personality.  Susanowo throws tantrums that would put Boku-no-hiiro’s Bakugo to shame, and as he hoots and hollers, and weeps and wails, through the world, he leaves a swath of destruction in his wake.  In the Kojiki, and similar stories, Izanagi confronts his son, Susanowo, and asks what has caused him to abandon oversight of his domain—after all, things are looking pretty bad down in the earthly realm about now.

Well, it turns out, Susanowo is actually just a huge momma’s boy, and he can’t stand to be in the world without his mother—which is a bit strange, because in the Kojiki he was blown out of Izanagi’s nose well after that whole debacle with Izanami down in the land of Yomi.  Regardless, Izanagi gets pissed, and basically tells him that if he loves his mom *so* much, he can go and live with her in the Netherworld, and thus expels him from the earth.

In the main Nihon Shoki account it is similar, but since Izanami never passed away, there is no cause for Susanowo’s tear through the earthly realm—apparently he’s just being a jerk.  And so they both expel him to the Netherworld—Ne no Kuni.

The general presumption is that Ne no Kuni and Yomi are the same place, but it isn’t exactly clear, and I figure that is probably because these stories actually came from different places, and are being woven back together.  And that’s why Chewie is now Chief of Security on the Enterprise, which is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Regardless of the reason, Susanowo is being told to leave, but he asks for one favor:  He wants to go see his sister once more before he departs, and so it is agreed that he can go see her one more time before he has to go to the Netherworld and stay there.  Meanwhile, Izanagi departs the story at this point.  He takes up a “small mansion” up in the High Plain of Heaven.  Basically he moves into Amaterasu’s in-law suite, kicks back, and takes it easy.

So now Susanowo is headed up to the High Plain of Heaven to say farewell to his sister.  Except there is one problem—this is well before the time of email and cell phones, and nobody bothers to let Amaterasu know why her brother, who was just down on the earth causing all sorts of havoc, is headed her way.  When she gets word of his approach, she figures he can only be coming for one thing—to try to take the High Plain of Heaven for himself, and she is not giving it up without a fight.

And so when Susanowo approaches, he finds Amaterasu armed and ready to go to war.  She has her hair done up in large bunches on either side of her head, like the mizura style that seems to have been described already back in the Wei Chronicles.  She has strings of beads in her hair and around her arms, and she has a sword on her side, a bow in her hand, and two quivers—one on her back with a thousand arrows and one on her side with five hundred arrows—the archery equivalent of crossed bandoliers and two loaded guns.  She even has a tomo—an wrist-guard that not only protects the wrist but makes a loud sound when struck by the bowstring.  Her skirt is girded up around her legs like a pair of trousers, and she stamps her feet and yells out a fierce battle cry, which makes me think of the Maori Haka and similar martial challenges, meant to demonstrate one’s ferocity.  The stamping of feet could also be something akin the pre-bout ritual in sumou, where the participants lift up their legs and bring them back down, stamping the earth.

In the face of such ferocity, Susanowo calls out to Amaterasu to explain that he comes in peace—after all, he just wanted to see his dear sister before he had to leave the world forever.  This plea goes over about as well as you might expect, given Susanowo’s behavior so far—he’s been doing nothing but sowing destruction and chaos down in the earthly realm, why would his sister have any reason to believe he would suddenly change?  To prove his intent he suggests a special, godly trial—trial by procreation, one might call it.  He and his sister will each make more deities, like you do.  If the children he makes are female, he is lying, but if they are male, then he is telling the truth.

Amaterasu agrees, and she goes first, taking Susanowo’s sword and breaking it into three pieces.  She washes each piece in the well of Heaven, chews it up, and spits them out.  They become three female deities.

Susanowo then takes his turn, and he takes Amaterasu’s jewels and does the same thing, washing them in the well of Heaven, chewing them up, and spitting them out.  They become male deities, as he said, thus proving his intentions.

Of course, since the female deities came from Susanowo’s sword, they were determined to be his, and likewise the male deities belonged to Amaterasu since they came from her jewels.  In the main narrative, there are 8 kami created through this process—3 female and 5 male.  Together they are the “Hachioji”, or “8 Princes”.  The three female deities reside at Munakata Shrine—this is actually three shrines in one, in modern day Fukuoka Prefecture, and each kami resides at a different shrine.  Not only is it three shrines, but each one is on a different island:  The main shrine is on Kyushu, the middle shrine is on Oshima, and then the farthest shrine is on Okinoshima—the holy island in the middle of the Korean straits.

The male deities are said to reside with Amaterasu up in the High Plain of Heaven.  By most counts there are five, though some stories have a sixth—but since that breaks the math, he isn’t considered one of the Hachioji.  Most of these kami are said to be the ancestors of various families, and I won’t go through all of them here, but two in particular stand out.  The first one’s name is a mouthful:  Masaya Akatsu Kachi Hayabi Ama no Oshihomimi no Mikoto.  His name appears to be a reference to victory—Susanowo’s victory, in this case.  The second one has a slightly shorter name—Ame no Hohi no Mikoto.  They are said to the be ancestor of the Izumo no Omi.  Interesting side note, here:  The Izumo no Omi, or Chieftains of Izumo, also known as the Izumo Kuni no Miyatsuko, have reportedly survived into modern times, though without any real secular power and broken into two lineages—the Senge and the Kitajima.  The chief priest, or guiji, of the grand shrine of Izumo, Izumo Taisha, is still recognized as the Izumo Kuni no Miyatsuko, or Izumo Kokuso, even though they no longer have formal administrative authority over the territory of the ancient province.  In addition, they continue to claim descent from this same kami, Ame no Hohi no Mikoto.

But enough of that—the contest was won—I guess—and Susanowo had proven to Amaterasu that he had no ill-intent, and so he was allowed to stay in the Plain of High Heaven to say his farewell, which apparently dragged out a bit, because, based on what happened next, he must have been up there for at least 6 months, if not a year.  I mean, I guess there was no exact timetable on when he was supposed to head to the Netherworld, so why not make the vacation last a little longer, you know what I mean?  To be fair, there is one account that has him head straightaway back and on to Ne no Kuni, but in most of them he sticks around for a bit.

So there’s Susanowo, chillin’ in Takama no Hara, but it wasn’t to last.  I guess he had no ill intent when he arrived, but as they say, a leopard doesn’t change his spots.  Pretty soon Susanowo is back to his old self and being quite the nuisance.  First off, as they are planting the rice fields, he breaks down the pipes and barriers between the fields, fills up the irrigation ditches, sows a second set of seeds over the first, and set up his own markers of ownership in Amaterasu’s fields. He even lets his horses lie down in the fields, which would have just made a total mess of everything.

As you can imagine, all of this is a pretty gross violation of the social norms.  In fact, it almost feels like he does have a list of all the things you are not supposed to do and he’s going through them, one by one, like some perverted bucket list.  To an agricultural society, these would have been horrendous crimes.  He’s breaking down the communal infrastructure, ruining the harvest, and even poaching the land—putting down his own markers of ownership and removing Amaterasu’s.  She would have been totally within her rights to take out one of her 1500 arrows and send him back down to Ne no Kuni the hard way, but she doesn’t.  Instead, she comes up with all sorts of excuses for his shenanigans.

And then comes the time for the harvest.  As was traditional in those days, a new structure was built for the ceremony of the first fruits—one that would be free of any pollution or impurities by the very fact that it was new.  So what does Susanowo do?  He sneaks in and defecates right in the new building, defiling it.  Surely, if there was anything that would arose his sister to anger, that must be it, right?  I mean, can you imagine if someone came into your house and took a dump in your living room?  I bet you’d be pretty pissed off.  Amaterasu just passes it off as vomit from a night of heavy drinking and so excuses his behavior once again.

Finally, Amaterasu is in a sacred hall where she is weaving garments for the other kami.  In some stories she is doing the weaving and in others it is a servant—some name her as Waka-Hirume.  Whatever the case, Susanowo has one more bit of mischief planned.  He gets one of the heavenly colts, skins it backwards, and drops it through a hole in the top of the building where they are weaving the garments, giving everyone inside a fright.  Amaterasu—or her servant, in some stories—is so startled that she strikes herself in the groin with the shuttle.

And that’s the last straw.  Amaterasu has finally run out of patience , but rather than attacking Susanowo, she runs straight away to the Heavenly Rock Cave, where she locks herself inside.  And of course, since she is literally the sun goddess, she plunges the entire world into darkness as she does so.

Alright, so there is a lot to unpack in here.  First off, there is the question of why Susanowo is acting this way.  In some accounts he is simply a wild deity.  In some cases he is raging with victory after the contest with his sister, and goes on to the most destructive endzone dance ever.  And in some of the stories he is jealous, because Amaterasu’s fields are more productive than his, and his jealousy causes him to attack her in various ways.

Whatever his reasons, Susanowo’s offenses are pretty much a laundry list of things that people shouldn’t do.  Most of them are pretty obvious, but some not so much.  The agricultural destruction and poaching of land is clearly one category of offense.  Another is that of defiling a ritual area—in this case the ceremonial building.  Finally there is the “backwards flaying” of the heavenly colt, which is then flung into the weaving hall.  For this last, it would seem that just the act of throwing a dead horse into the weaving hall would, itself, be sufficient, and certainly not all of the stories mention the “backwards flaying”, or sakahagi.  That, however, seems to have, in fact, certain, specific significance.  Some scholars mention that this was taboo, but not why it was taboo.  Normally, skinning an animal is done in a particular way, because it is what makes the skin come off in the cleanest and easiest manner.  Doing it backwards would possibly make it harder—maybe messier—but it isn’t inherently wrong.  I wonder if it could have had something to do with incisions that would somehow ruin the skin for other users, but that is entirely conjecture.  There is another possibility, though, one proposed by Dr. Nelly Naumann, that is intriguing and may shed some light, here.  She proposed that doing anything in “reverse” or “backwards” had a magical or religious significance, and so it may have indicated some kind of magical curse being initiated by Susanowo upon Amaterasu.  This would then further explain the next part—where either Amaterasu or her maiden strike themselves with the shuttle of the loom.

So to really get a good picture of this next part, we need to understand a few things—I said there was a lot to unpack in here, didn’t I?  So weaving seems to have been one of the things that came over with agriculture during the start of the Yayoi period, and with it came the early looms—there may have been a form of weaving even earlier, based on Jomon evidence, and there was certainly braiding, but we definitely know that it was available in the Yayoi period.  These looms were typically long and thin—fabric widths in most of Japanese history are typically between 14 to 20 inches, and this was because of the size and type of loom; you usually sat down, typically on the ground, and you needed to be able to easily reach either side of the fabric so that you could manipulate the shuttles, as well as the rest of the loom.  Now, the story is that the weaver—whether Amaterasu or her assistant—got startled and slammed the shuttle into her private parts and was injured, or even died.  This begs a serious question, though:  I mean, how?  Okay, I get that a shuttle has a point, but in the typical act of weaving, the shuttle is going back and forth or it is on one side or the other.  It just doesn’t really make a lot of sense without something else happening—but this is a story about the gods and there is so much more that might be going on.

I mean, I guess it is possible that originally it wasn’t a loom—perhaps it was another type of weaving, like kute-uchi, or handloop braiding?  But the Japanese knew the difference, and it shows up as a shuttle in both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.  Could it be something more allegorical?  The name of a shuttle is “HI”, which sounds the same as the word for SUN, which we find in names and titles like Hime, Hiko, Himiko—even Oho-hirume and Waka-Hirume.  That certainly would follow on the overall theme.

And weaving was certainly important in other cults across east Asia.  Weaving was associated with Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, and Michael Como has suggested that Amaterasu’s worship may have been a variant of weaving cults traced back to this Chinese prototype. 

And then, of course, there is the placement of the injury.  In fact, this seems to be a not-uncommon occurrence in the Kiki of people identified as women being harmed in the genital region in various ways.    Izanami’s groin is burned by the birth of Kagatsuchi, which is blamed for her death.  Then there is this story, of Amaterasu or her maidservant.  Later, Yamato Totohi Momoso Himemiko, the shamaness aunt of Sujin and wife to Ohomonomochi, the Deity of Miwa, was also said to have died after being wounded in the groin by chopsticks.  Is there some greater significance to women dying in this fashion—something to do with an injury to the chief symbol of women’s femininity?

Of course, there is no way to really know. 

I do wonder if this whole thing isn’t somehow connected to stories about someone (or some kami) known as “Hirume”—Waka-Hirume and Ohohirume—that were later connected to another tradition, one about Amaterasu Ohokami?  Perhaps something related to the Izumo myths about Susanowo—he is, after all, the primary actor, even if Amaterasu herself takes pride of place.  Unfortunately, the stories are too jumbled to make sense of, and just like Dr. Who, we are missing many of the crucial early episodes that might otherwise define things.

Regardless of just what was going on, it all leads to the next part of the story, which is perhaps the most famous story of Amaterasu and the one that most people probably know.  I’m speaking, of course, of her disappearance into the Heavenly Rock Cave—Ama no Iwato.

And so, with darkness across the land, all the kami of the Heavenly Plain gathered together, and they looked to Omohikane, child of Takami-musubi, one of the first kami who came into being even before Izanagi and Izanami.

So Omohikane, whose name literally refers to thinking, hatches a plan.  The elements vary, but it goes a little something like this: 

•             He gathers some roosters—poetically known as the “long-singing birds of the Eternal lands”, and he made them cry out to one another.  Even today, roosters are a symbol of Amaterasu and can be found roaming the grounds of her main shrine at Ise Jingu.

•             He then has several items acquired or made with a connection to the Heavenly Mt. Kagu.  While technically this is a Heavenly “copy”, it is an interesting choice, as Mt. Kagu is one of three famous mountains in the Yamato region, and it sits only 8 km south of modern Makimuku in Sakurai, which, if you remember, is one of the leading candidates for the location of Himiko’s palace in the 3rd century.

o             He has an image made of Amaterasu, as well as a sun spear, from the copper of the Heavenly Mt. Kagu, commissioning a local metalworker.

o             They also get the shoulder bones of deer from the Mountain for a little bit of scapulimancy—shoulder bone divination—and they get a sacred sakaki tree to use in the ceremonies.

•             In addition, they have people gather or make magatama jewels, bronze mirrors, combs, and strips of cloth.

Once everything is arranged, they set up the sakaki tree—this is the same kind of broadleaf evergreen tree that is still used in many Shinto rites, today—and they decorate it almost like the European yuletide celebrations.  In the upper branches they hung the magatama jewels.  In the middle branches they hung a large mirror.  And on the bottom branches they hung strips of white and blue or green cloth made from hemp and mulberry.

Several of the kami then stood outside the Heavenly Rock Cave, while Amaterasu’s servant, Ame no Uzume, made herself ready.  She made a headdress of the sacred sakaki branches and tied up her sleeves with moss.  They lit fires, and she began to dance comically on top of an overturned tub.  As she danced, she exposed her breasts, and pushed her skirt down towards her knees.  The kami gathered around began laughing and making a tremendous racket as she did so.

Meanwhile, sulking in her cave, Amaterasu heard the laughter and saw the glimmer of the lights of the fire. She couldn’t believe anyone was enjoying themselves in the dark—they should all be cowering in fear—but there they were.  And so she crept towards the commotion.

As soon as she was close enough to the entrance, Tajiwarawo no Kami grabbed her and pulled her out of the cave, while Ame no Koyane no Mikoto and Futotama no Mikoto held out a sacred rope between them so that she could not run back, and they pleaded with her to not go back in.  And thus, with Amaterasu returned to the world, the light of the sun was returned.

Alright, so this is probably the most famous story that we know about Amaterasu, though once again she is less active and more passive in this story.  The main focus, instead, is on the kami who are working to bring her out of the Rock Cave.  Ame no Uzume, for example—in one of the other accounts, she’s actually the one who first tells Amaterasu that Susanowo is on his way up to the High Plain of Heaven, and now here she is giving a kind of comedic strip tease.  There are many that point out how this dance shares traits with various shamanic practices, particularly the idea of wildly dancing about to encourage a spirit to possess the shamans, or medium.  Combined with the description of the sakaki in her hair, and some wonder if this could be a relic of some of the older traditions, possibly from the time of Himiko or even earlier.  Even today, miko are often called upon to dance as part of shrine ceremonies, though it typically doesn’t get quite so Cabaret as the dance described here.

And there are other characters here that would have at least been important to the court audience of the early 8th century.  Ame no Koyane and Futotama, for example, were the ancestors of two rival families, the Nakatomi and the Imbe.  We’ll hear more about them later, certainly, but for now you should understand that both families were court ritualists.  The Imbe—or Imibe—were a family group created from abstainers—possibly descended from the original jisai abstainers who were employed to bring good fortune to large endeavors like the trips to the Chinese court.  The Nakatomi, on the other hand, were in charge of several rituals that were important to the court.  Not only that, but the Fujiwara family, which had branched off from the Nakatomi in the 7th century, were now directly connected via marriage to the imperial family.  In the variations of the stories you can sometimes even see the bias—there is one version where it is Ama no Koyane who is given the credit for *everything* that is done, and he is shown directing all of the work.  Clearly that has a slightly Nakatomi bias.  In the Kogo Shui, written in the early Heian period, the story is once more recounted, this time by a member of the Imbe specifically citing their grievances with the Fujiwara (once Nakatomi) essentially shutting them out of the court rituals—and thus political power.

This is a part of the story that is clearly soaked with meaning.  The Rock Cave might be a reference to the ancient kofun tombs—a literal death of the sun.  At the same time, that whole thing feels a lot like the description of a solar eclipse, with the moon as the door closing out the light of the sun.  But there is also the suggestion that this was connected with winter solstice, after the harvest time, as the nights grow darker and colder.

That theme continues when you look at how the entire episode was connected to one called the Chinkonsai—this was a ritual conducted towards the end of the year—typically in the 11th lunar month, which would have put it in December or January—around the winter solstice.  That was meant to “call back”, “pacify”, and “strengthen” the spirit of the tenno before they participated in the Niiname sai or the Daijo sai—the feast of first fruits or the feast of enthronement, if a new Tenno was taking the throne.  This is connected to how they “called back” Amaterasu into the light.  That puts it somewhat out of order with the story, so I suspect that the Chinkon sai borrowed from this episode, but given that the first mention of it wasn’t until 685, in the reign of Temmu—and even that is in question, since it isn’t named as such until much later.

It seems more likely, to me, that what is described conforms to other rituals, perhaps even rituals that are no longer extant, but as quote-unquote “history” is written down, it would make sense that rituals would try to borrow from it, looking to the past to find a purer and more authentic practice.

Speaking of past practices: The references to the mirrors and the beads certainly seem to conform.  We’ve previously discussed the importance of mirrors in the kofun and earlier periods, and we’ve already seen a connection between mirrors and the sun and the moon.  We also see the jewels invoked, and the mirror and jewel are two of the three common pieces of the imperial regalia, along with the sword.

And then there is the tree—a sakaki tree.  This idea of the tree may not be that far fetched and may come from a much earlier tradition.  Kidder mentions drawings of tree-like structures on boats, and we will see other, similar descriptions.  The sakaki, of course, is an evergreen tree, and its leafy branches are often used to decorate both jinja and home shrines.

Following the ceremony to lure the sun goddess out of the cave, the kami hand out their punishments.  There are effectively three punishments, which roughly correspond to the three areas of trespass committed by Susanowo.  First there is him breaking and destroying the rice fields.  This would have been destruction or theft of property, either privately held or held by the community—especially in the case of irrigation systems, which would have been something an entire village would have worked on, together.  That corresponds with basically a fine—in this case 100 tables of offerings. I don’t know if payment in food was a typical way of paying off debts and fines before currency was widespread, or this was specifically something related to the kami and their worship, but rice itself would remain the primary currency up until quite recently, so perhaps there was a connection.

The next punishment is pulling out his hair, and possibly his fingernails and toenails.  Some kind of corporal punishment, which would appear to correspond with his defilement of the ritual palace.  The fingernails and toenails may have been something else, though, as it is used as an explanation as to why such things should be disposed of properly, as well.

Finally, the most serious punishment seems to be exile, which most clearly links to him throwing a skinned colt through the roof of the weaving hall and, by his actions, the weaving maiden dies or Amaterasu goes through a symbolic “death” of the sun.  If Dr. Naumann is correct, then the reverse flaying may have been a curse—one that achieved its end when the weaver perished.  It seems odd that Susanowo would be merely ostracized—though he was on his way to Ne no Kuni, the Netherworld, so maybe they thought they were good at that point.

By the way, does it seem odd to anyone else that exile is a punishment, when, according to what happened earlier, isn’t that what should have been happening all along?  Susanowo was supposed to arrive in Heaven, make his goodbyes, and then head to the Nether World.  But the way this story unfolds, he had to be there for at least a single season, if not an entire year.  After all, early on he is destroying the crops as they are planted or still young.  Then he defiles the hall to be used for the festival of first fruits—the harvest festival.  The whole incident with the rock cave suggests the winter solstice.

Personally, I don’t know.  It really feels like we have two completely different stories—first there is the whole thing with Izanagi and Izanami, and then there is this whole thing on the High Plain of Heaven.  I can’t help but wonder if some of what we are seeing are two or more stories, and this is just an example of how they all have been explicitly connected.

There is even one version that has all the events turned around.  It starts with the destruction of the rice fields, which causes Amaterasu to flee into the cave, which then leads to Susanowo’s exile, before which he goes to visit his sister one last time and they end up creating the Hachioji together.  To top it off, that story even put this whole episode of his departure in the rainy season, though that would seem to put it several months after the rest of the action, at least if we assume the Rock Cave incident was all around the winter solstice and not just a solar eclipse.  Regardless, the idea of a cold, hard rain pounding down around him as he goes from house to house looking for shelter in his rice straw hat and rain cape would certainly make for good cinematic storytelling. It also helps explain a very strange custom in the 7th and 8th century, at least:  Apparently you could be fined for entering someone’s house in a rain hat, coast, and with a bundle on your back.

Eh, who am I kidding?  It doesn’t really explain it at all, but it does give us a little interesting insight into Nara period culture.

Now, beyond all that, has anyone else noticed the conspicuous absence of the third member of the family?  Tsukuyomi?  Does nobody else find that odd?

There is, in fact, one minor story that we skipped.  It is only in the Nihon Shoki.  In it, before everything with Susanowo, Amaterasu sends Tsukuyomi down to earth to wait upon Ukemochi no Kami, a goddess of food.  When Tsukuyomi arrives, Ukemochi produces all kinds of grains and other foodstuffs from her mouth, and serves them to Tsukuyomi.  Tsukuyomi is having none of it, though—food from someone’s mouth?  That’s disgusting!  And so he up and slays Ukemochi for her offense.

Dude!  Harsh!  He was supposed to be serving her, and he kills her because of how she creates food?  It is said that Amaterasu was so appalled with Tsukuyomi’s actions that she banished him from her presence—and that is why the sun shines in the day and the moon shines at night.

Oh, and poor Ukemochi?  Amaterasu sends a servant to check on her, but she is already dead.  Nonetheless, food and other things are growing out of her body—the ox and horse from the top of her head, millet at her forehead, silkworms for eyebrows, grass in her eyes, rice in her belly, and large and small beans—possibly soy beans and azuki beans—in her genitals.  As some scholars have pointed out, this whole story actually sounds similar to other, similar agricultural stories throughout Indonesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, where a woman, or mother figure, dies and from her comes agriculture.  Some people have even connected this with the Jomon dogu figurines, though that link seems tenuous at best.

So was this a myth shared with those other cultures?  Perhaps something that had come north along the Ryukyu chain, or even something that had come through some common linkages on the Asian mainland?  It is hard to say, but its presence and similarity is intriguing.  Like Izanagi throwing various tools behind him as he escapes Yomi, these commonalities in myths across different cultures are intriguing.

So this would seem to be Tsukuyomi’s 15 minutes of fame, except for one tiny detail.  Like a bad reboot of your favorite childhood television program growing up, they tell the story again, but swapping out the main characters with new actors.  In this case it is Susanowo, and it takes place as he is leaving the Heavenly Plain.  Here, Susanowo comes across Ogetsu Hime, and just like the story of Ukemochi, she offers Susanowo food, but her methods are more, shall we say, diverse.  She doesn’t simply create food from her mouth, but also from her nose and from her, as Chamberlain translates it, “fundament”—she’s literally pulling it out of her ass, as they say.  Susanowo sees this, and he thinks she must be taking a dump on the food before serving it to him, and so he kills her, then and there.  As with the story of Ukemochi, her corpse is transformed into silkworms, rice, millet, azuki beans, barley, and soybeans.  These are gathered up by Kami Musubi no Kami—another one of those that preceded Izanagi and Izami—and used as seeds to be planted around the rest of the world.

The story is in the Kojiki, so technically the Nihon Shoki version is the reboot, I guess, and today the two kami, Ukemochi and Ohogetsu Hime, are assumed to be one in the same.  Which story came first?  Who knows.  Certainly the story in the Kojiki makes more sense in terms of why Susanowo thought she was befouling the food, but without the story in the Nihon Shoki, Tsukuyomi barely gets any screen time at all.  In the end, you’ll have to determine your own head cannon for these events.

And I think that’s where we’ll leave things, for now.  This episode was a bit longer than I intended.  Next we’ll look at Susanowo’s trip down to the earthly realm and eventually to Ne-no-kuni.  And after him we’ll have another Izumo deity to consider—Ohokuninushi. Until then, thank you for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, we have information about our KoFi site over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we’ll also have some photos of various artifacts that we’ve discussed, as well as references and other material used for this episode.  Questions or comments?  Feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.

That’s all for now.  Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.