So this episode we get to see a different side of Susano’o. He isn’t ruining rice paddies of skinning horses to scare poor weaving maidens. This time, he is rescuing maidens from serpents, bringing trees and making Japan lush and green, and building fences around his wife’s palace—and let me tell you, he is darn proud of those fences!

Susano’o is one of the famous gods of Izumo, as well as brother to Amaterasu, and most of the action takes place there. I’ve included a simple map showing the location of Torikami Falls—presumably the same Torikami of the story—on Mt. Sentsū. You can see the Hi River (now the Hii River—though for some reason Google is calling it the Ibi River in English) flowing from there to Lake Shinji, on the Shimane peninsula, between Izumo City and Matsue. Further south you can see the Gou-no-kawa (江の川), whose name might also be read as “E” or “Ye” River, and which flows north from old Aki Province through ancient Izumo Province to the Japan Sea. Some of the earliest square shaped burials, a hallmark of the culture that was around Izumo in the Yayoi period, seem to have started around Miyoshi on the Gou River, and then spread north into Izumo, Tottori, and beyond. If that is the case, and the Gou or Ye River was once so important to the region, it is no wonder that one of the stories may have found themselves set there, instead of the Hi River, which was closer to what would become the political center of the region.

Not shown are the Isonokami Futsumitama Shrine, in Okayama, the former ancient country of Kibi. This shrine—or some earlier version of it—is probably the Isonokami mentioned in the chronicles where one of Susano’o’s swords, said to be the one used to slay Orochi, was kept with the “Kamibe” (shrine attendants) of Kibi. It is still said to be an important shrine in modern Okayama Prefecture.

Also missing is the Kii Peninsula, far to the other side of Yamato. There are a few mentions of Kii some of the stories, and it does have a Kumano Taisha of its own, wherein is enshrined a version of Susano’o as a Buddhist deity.

Of course the main shrine for Susano’o is generally agreed to be just a little way from Suga in Izumo, in modern Yasugi prefecture. The Kumano Taisha, there, is the one most commonly associated with Susano’o’s spirit.

Speaking of Shrines, we did add Suga and a route between Torikami and Suga on the map, so you can see where they are, relatively. There is even a nice video on YouTube from Tokyo Street View that I thought gave a nice impression of the current incarnation of the Suga shrine, which claims to be the first shrine of Izumo:

Of course, I don’t know if any of the walls there are the “eightfold fences” of the story, but here is the poem as a reminder:

Kofun era walled settlement and wealthy person’s residence, from the Rekihaku Museum in Sakura.

八雲立つ
出雲八重垣
妻籠みに
八重垣作る
その八重垣を

Yakumo tatsu
Izumo yabegaki
tsuma-gomi ni
yabegaki tsukuru
sono yabegaki wo

Personally, I think those walls could have multiple meanings, but it does make me think of the walls around sacred spaces as well as the walls around the residences—or palaces—of important persons and places. in the Kofun and later. Even the early Yayoi settlements are often moated and walled, and the imagery may have changed and shifted over time.

Susano’o’s descendants

Suga no Yuyama Nushi is also known as Yashima Jinmui no Kami. From him we have another five descendants listed, at least in the Kojiki:

Ōtoshi no Kami
Fuha no Mojikunusunu no Kami
Fukabuchi no Mizuyare Hana no Kami
Omizunu no Kami (known in the Izumo Fudoki as Yatsukamizu Omizunu no Mikoto who pulled the land of Izumo together)
Ame no Fuyukinu no Kami (who took Kusanagi back up to the Heavenly Plain)
Ōnamuchi no Kami, aka Ōkuninushi (the subject of our next episode)

Two of these have roles beyond just being a list of names. Yatsukamizu Omizunu could be read as the Lord of the Great Water, which in Izumo is probably the Hi River, though there are other bodies of water that it could be as well. So then this could be the Great Lord of the Hi River. And where did all of this start? At the Headwaters of that very same Hi River.

Omizunu isn’t given a lot of screentime in the Kojiki, and pretty much none in the Nihon Shoki, likely because he isn’t directly related to the story of the Imperial line, and remember, that’s the story that the Chronicles were commissioned to tell. They didn’t need to muck it up with even more stories, as much as some of us wish they had. And so Omizunu’s biggest accomplishment goes almost unreported: the Kunibiki, or Land Pulling episode. This is one of the few myths that is completely laid out in the Izumo Fudoki—most are simply referenced in conjunction with the various locations. That would seem to indicate that it had a certain amount of importance to the people of the region. So we’ll want to talk about this more when we really dig into Izumo as a whole, but the land-pulling story goes something roughly like this: Omizunu decided that the land of Izumo was too small—it was like a thin strip of cloth, so he was going to sew some pieces on. He decided to pull pieces of land over from Silla, from the islands north of Izumo, and even from Koshi—thought to be the Hokuriku area. He pulled in land from all of these places, anchored them to Mt. Sahime, and essentially built Izumo.

Mt. Sahime, today, is known as Mt Sanbe, and what river runs south of it? The Gou no Kawa, or our Ye River.

Omizunu’s progeny has his own 15 minutes of fame in the spotlight. He is the one that takes Ama no Murakumo and delivers it to the kami of the Heavenly Plain. We will later see his son, Ōnamuchi, giving up much more—but that’s still yet to come in our story, so we won’t get too far ahead of ourselves.

Speaking of swords, many of the swords are measured in terms of “hands”—this is assumed to be about the width of a palm (so thumb to little finger, rather than wrist to fingertip). If so, a 10 hand sword would probably be about a meter long. This is not that long as far as some later swords go, but plenty long when we consider most of the “swords” we find in the earlier periods are more like daggers. But during the Kofun period they had plenty of swords that were long enough to qualify, so it could be something like one of these:

Kofun era swords at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Of course, Murakumo, later known as Kusanagi, is part of the imperial regalia. There are still questions as to whether or not it is the original or a copy—after all, some say that the original was lost at the battle of Dannoura during the Gempei Wars—but regardless it is rarely seen and kept at Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya. We will definitely be talking about it again. I’ve seen pictures that claim to be drawings of the sword, but haven not been able to verify any of them.

And that’s it for this blog post. I hope that people are staying healthy and sane.

References

Ō, Yasumaro & Heldt, G. (2014). The Kojiki: An account of ancient matters. ISBN978-0-231-16389-7
Ooms, Herman (2009). Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650-800. ISBN978-0-8248-3235-3
Bentley, J. (2006). The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Retrieved May 1, 2020, from https://brill.com/view/title/12964
Gadaleva, E. (2000). Susanoo: One of the Central Gods in Japanese Mythology. Japan Review,(12), 165-203. Retrieved April 18, 2020 from www.jstor.org/stable/25791053
Aoki, Michiko Yamaguchi (1997) Records of Wind and Earth: A Translation of Fudoki with Introduction and Commentaries. Association for Asian Studies. As hosted on the Japanese Historical Text Initiative of the University of California, Berkely, https://jhti.berkeley.edu/index.html
Chamberlain, B. H. (1981). The Kojiki: Records of ancient matters. Rutland, Vt: C.E. Tuttle Co. ISBN4-8053-0794-3
Aston, W. G. (1972). Nihongi, chronicles of Japan from the earliest times to A.D. 697. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN0-80480984-4
Philippi, D. L. (1968). Kojiki. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN4-13-087004-1