Ookuninushi

Also Known As: Ōkuninushi no Kami, “Master of the Great Land”; earlier and throughout the Izumo material Ōnamuchi or Ōanamuchi, “the Great Name Possessor”; also Ashihara-shikoo, “the Ugly Male of the Reed Plain”, Yachihoko, “Eight Thousand Spears”, and Utsushikunitama, “Spirit of the Living Land”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He heals what is broken, finishes the unfinished world, and binds people to one another, having learned all three by being broken, unfinished and alone first.
Role in Mythos: He builds and consolidates the earthly realm, then hands its visible governance to the sun goddess’s line and takes the unseen world in exchange.
Relation to Humans: He is credited with giving people medicine, farming and the charms that keep pests off a crop, which makes him one of the few great kami whose reputation rests on practical usefulness rather than terror. Worshippers still come to him at Izumo to have their connections arranged, from marriages down to the friendships they have not made yet.

Salt water had dried on the hare’s raw body and the wind coming off the Inaba coast finished the work, splitting the skin open until the animal could do nothing but lie in the sand and cry. Eighty gods had already walked past it. They were the ones who had suggested the sea-bathing, and they had laughed about it, and they had gone on toward the house of the princess they all intended to marry. The last of the party came along behind them because he was carrying their bags.

He stopped and asked what was wrong. The hare told him the whole humiliating story, including the trick it had played to get across the water from the island of Oki: it had challenged the sea-beasts of the strait to count their own numbers, made them lie in a line, and run across their backs like stepping stones, then boasted about the deception one stride too early and lost its coat to the last one in the row. The young god listened to all of it. Then he told the hare to go to the river mouth, wash in fresh water, and roll in the pollen of the sedges growing there. The fur came back. The hare, whole again, made him a promise that reads like a coronation: the eighty gods would not have the Princess of Yakami, and the one carrying the luggage would.

She chose him, and his brothers set about killing him for it. At the foot of a mountain in the land of Hahaki they heated a boulder until it glowed, rolled it down the slope, and told him to catch the red boar they were driving. He caught it. He burned to death on the spot. His mother went up to heaven and pleaded, and two shellfish goddesses were sent down to scrape and scorch a shell into powder, mix it with water, and smear the paste over him like milk, and he stood up a beautiful young man and wandered off as though nothing had happened. So they killed him again. This time they split a great tree with a wedge, stood him in the gap, and pulled the wedge out. His mother found him and opened the tree and brought him back a second time, and then told him plainly what she should have said earlier: stay here and they will finish you.

He dies twice before his own story properly begins.

What follows is the strangest apprenticeship in Japanese myth. Sent down to the Nether Distant Land, he arrives at the palace of Susanoo, and Susanoo’s daughter comes out to look at him. They marry on sight, which is not a decision either of them appears to think about. She goes back in and tells her father a very beautiful deity has come. Her father comes out, calls him the ugly male of the reed plain, and puts him to bed in a room full of snakes. She gives him a scarf and tells him to wave it three times, and the snakes settle, and he sleeps well. The next night it is centipedes and wasps and a second scarf. Then Susanoo fires a humming arrow into the middle of a moor, sends him after it, and sets the grass alight all around him; a mouse arrives to say that the ground is hollow underneath and narrow on top, and he stamps through and falls into the cavity while the fire passes overhead, and the mouse’s children bring him the arrow’s feathers in their mouths.

The last test is domestic and worse. Susanoo has him pick the lice out of his hair, and the hair is full of centipedes, so his wife hands him red earth and the berries of a muku tree; he chews the berries, spits the red pulp out, and lets the old god believe he is crunching centipedes for him. Susanoo is touched by this and falls asleep. The younger god ties his father-in-law’s hair to the rafters, blocks the door with a rock five hundred men could not shift, puts his wife on his back, and runs, taking the great life-sword, the life-bow and arrows, and the heavenly speaking lute. The lute catches a tree on the way out. The ground rings with the sound. Susanoo wakes, pulls his own house down getting free, and pursues them as far as the pass into Hades, where instead of striking he shouts a blessing shaped like an insult: take the sword and the bow, drive your brothers into the rivers, become the Master of the Great Land, plant your temple pillars deep in the rock and raise the crossbeams to the sky, and live there, you villain.

That is the point at which he acquires the name. It is worth noticing that he did not have it before, and that the sovereignty behind it was handed to him by the god of the land of the dead rather than by heaven.

Then he began to make the land, and could not do it by himself. He said so out loud: how shall I alone be able to make this land, and with what deity can I make it? The answer came twice. A tiny god arrived at the cape of Miho on the crest of a wave, sailing a seed-pod boat and dressed in flayed skins, refusing to give his name until a toad suggested asking the scarecrow, who cannot walk but knows everything under heaven. The two of them were made brothers and finished the land together, teaching medicine and farming and the incantations that keep birds and beasts and insects off a crop, until the small one crossed over to the Eternal Land and left him alone again. The second answer came as a light on the water, a deity who offered to help on one condition: build me a shrine on the eastern mountain of Yamato. That one still sits on the top of Mount Mimoro.

His powers all come out of that pattern. He can restore a body, because his own was restored twice from a paste of burnt shell. He gives medicine and agriculture because he was taught them by a stranger from the sea. He rules by inheritance from the underworld rather than from the sky, which is why the domain he ends up with is the invisible one. When the sun goddess looked down at the finished world and decided her descendants should have it, she sent messenger after messenger until the last negotiation was settled on the sand at Inasa Beach; he gave up the visible land in exchange for a shrine, and the tradition holds that the shrine raised for him at Izumo once stood high enough to need a staircase like a ramp. The Izumo Fudoki, compiled in his own province by a high priest with his own view of things, tells the land-making in a register subtly unlike the court chronicles, which is a reminder that the surrender was written down by both sides.

His weakness is simply stated. He cannot hold anything on his own. He needed his mother to raise him, a wife to arm him, a dwarf from over the sea and a light on the water to finish his work, and in the end he could not keep the country he had made. What he was given instead was the unseen half of everything: the spirits of the dead, and the arrangement of human bonds. Every year in the tenth lunar month the rest of Japan calls the season the month without gods, because they have all gone to Izumo to sit with him for a week and decide who will meet whom.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ookuninushi?

Ookuninushi is the ruler and builder of the earthly world in Japanese mythology, and the deity enshrined at Izumo Ōyashiro in Shimane Prefecture. He appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, both compiled in the early eighth century, first under the name Ōnamuchi and later under the title Ōkuninushi, “Master of the Great Land.”

What is the story of the White Hare of Inaba?

A hare tricked the sea-beasts of the strait into forming a bridge so it could cross from the island of Oki, boasted about the deception too soon, and was stripped of its fur by the last beast in the line. Ookuninushi’s eighty brothers told it to bathe in salt water and dry in the wind, which made the injury far worse. Ookuninushi told it to wash in fresh water and roll in sedge pollen instead, and the hare recovered and predicted he would win the Princess of Yakami.

How did Ookuninushi get his name?

Susanoo gave it to him. After Ookuninushi escaped the underworld with Susanoo’s daughter, his sword, his bow and his lute, Susanoo pursued him to the pass into Hades and, instead of killing him, ordered him to defeat his brothers, become the Master of the Great Land, and build a great temple. Before that moment he was called Ōnamuchi, “the Great Name Possessor.”

What is the kuni-yuzuri, and what did Ookuninushi get in return?

The kuni-yuzuri is the “relinquishing of the land,” in which Ookuninushi surrendered the visible world to the descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu after a series of divine envoys came to negotiate, the last of them at Inasa Beach. In exchange he received a great shrine at Izumo and authority over the unseen world, including the spirits of the dead.

Why is Ookuninushi the god of en-musubi?

Because his half of the settlement was the invisible one, which includes the connections between people. En-musubi means the tying of bonds, and although it is usually associated with romance and marriage, it covers every relationship a person forms. In the tenth lunar month the deities of Japan are said to gather at Izumo to decide the coming year’s bonds, so that the month called kannazuki, “the month without gods,” elsewhere is called kamiarizuki, “the month with gods,” in Izumo.