Ōyamatsumi

Also Known As: Ōyamatsumi-no-Kami; Ōyamazumi-no-Ōkami; 大山津見神 in the Kojiki, 大山祇神 in the Nihon Shoki; rendered “the Deity Great-Mountain-Possessor” by Chamberlain
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds the mountains and everything the mountains contain, and his authority passes down through an enormous line of daughters and grandchildren rather than through force.
Role in Mythos: He is the mountain god whose refused gift of his elder daughter fixed the shortness of human life.
Relation to Humans: Mortals depend on what his ground yields, timber and ore and water and safe passage over the ridges, and they have petitioned him for it since at least the sixth century. Warriors in particular went to him for victory and returned afterwards to leave their weapons and armour at his shrine.

Salt wind comes off the Seto Inland Sea and moves through a grove of camphor trees so old that two of them were already ancient when the shrine beneath them was raised. Men walked up between those trunks in armour. Many of them walked back down without it.

The god they came to was not a war god by origin. Ōyamatsumi is a mountain deity, and the mountains are his in a proprietary sense that the usual English word “god” softens too much. The elements of his name are an honorific, the word for mountain, and a term for divine spirit, and Basil Hall Chamberlain, translating the Kojiki in the nineteenth century, settled on “the Deity Great-Mountain-Possessor.” Possessor is the right register. Ridges, passes, gorges, timber, the ore under the rock and the water coming out of it: his.

The record cannot agree on where he came from. In the Kojiki he arrives quietly, in the long procession of deities born to Izanagi and Izanami after they finished giving birth to the islands, listed immediately after the deity of trees and immediately before the deity of moors. The Nihon Shoki tells it with a knife. In one variant Izanagi, enraged by the fire child Kagutsuchi who burned his wife to death in the bearing, cuts the corpse into five pieces, and each piece stands up as a mountain god: the head becomes Ōyamatsumi, the trunk becomes Naka-yama-tsumi, the hands Ha-yama-tsumi, the loins Masaka-yama-tsumi, the feet Shiki-yama-tsumi. Another variant makes it three pieces. Both versions cannot be true. What survives across all of them is the same idea in two grammars, that mountains are either something the world gave birth to or something left over from a killing.

He divided his holdings almost at once. With the moor goddess Kaya-no-hime he fathered eight deities who split mountain and moor between them, and their names read like a surveyor’s list rather than a pantheon: the heavenly and earthly elders of the passes, the heavenly and earthly pass-boundaries, the heavenly and earthly dark gorges, the prince and princess of the great fold in the hills. Stand at the top of a worn track in cloud, where the cedar goes black and the air turns cold and wet against the face, and the ancient Japanese answer to the question of who governs that specific place was: this one, by name, and no other.

His real influence, though, runs through his daughters, and it is startling how much of Japanese myth turns out to be his family business. In Izumo, an old man weeping beside the river Hi introduces himself to Susanoo as an Earthly Deity, child of Ōyamatsumi. His last surviving daughter is the girl the eight-forked serpent is coming for, which makes the sword Kusanagi, drawn from the serpent’s tail, a prize taken out of the mountain god’s own bloodline. Susanoo later married another of his daughters and fathered the great harvest deity and the august spirit of food. A third daughter married into the line that produced Ōkuninushi. Grain, rice, the land of Izumo and the sword of the imperial regalia all pass through the house of a god of stone.

Then comes the meeting at the cape of Kasasa. Ninigi, grandson of the sun goddess and newly descended to rule the earth, finds a beautiful woman there and asks whose daughter she is. She is Ōyamatsumi’s, called Princess-Blossoming-Brilliantly-Like-the-Flowers-of-the-Trees, and she tells him she cannot answer for herself, her father will answer. The father, when asked, was greatly delighted. He sent her with a hundred tables of goods, and he sent her elder sister with her, Iwanaga-hime, Princess-Long-as-the-Rocks.

Ninigi took one look at the elder sister and sent her home.

The mountain god’s reply is one of the coldest speeches in the Kojiki. He had sent both, he explained, under a pledge: by Iwanaga-hime, the offspring of heaven would endure unmoved as the rocks endure, though the snow fall and the wind blow, and by the younger, they would flourish as the blossom flourishes. One daughter was permanence and one was beauty, and they were meant to be taken together. Since the rock had been returned and only the flower kept, the offspring of heaven would be frail as the flowers of trees. The text adds, flatly, that this is why the lives of the sovereigns are not long down to the present day. A god shamed at his own front door invented death for everyone downstream of the man who shamed him.

The insult compounded within the year. Married for a single night, Konohanasakuya-hime announced she was pregnant, and Ninigi said what he said: not in one night, not mine, it must be some earthly god’s. She built a hall eight fathoms long without doors, sealed herself inside with earth packed into the entrance, and set it burning to prove the children were his. Three sons came out of the fire. The youngest was ancestor to the imperial house, which makes Ōyamatsumi its great-grandfather and the author of its mortality in the same generation.

No text describes what he looks like. He is one of the few major figures in the record built entirely out of possessions, offspring and one devastating speech, with no face attached, and the absence sits oddly well on a god whose body is arguably the terrain itself.

Worship found him anyway. His head shrine stands on Ōmishima in the Seto Inland Sea, the first-ranked shrine of the old province of Iyo and the parent of thousands of Mishima and Yamazumi shrines across the country, and there the mountain god became a sea god too, keeper of safe passage, and then a god of war. Its treasure hall holds one of the largest surviving collections of arms and armour designated National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties in Japan, offerings from warriors whose prayers were answered. In 1541 a teenage priestess of the shrine named Tsuruhime led its forces against an invading clan while declaring herself the god’s living avatar. Her small breastplate is still in the case.

For all that, his power has a shape and a limit. It is jurisdictional rather than sovereign. He gives, and he can refuse to give, and he can state the terms out loud, but he cannot compel a heavenly grandson to accept a wife, and he never once takes the field himself. His weapon is the wording of a gift. His weakness is that he minds being humiliated more than he minds the consequences, and the consequences fell on his own descendants: the curse that shortened every human life shortened his great-grandsons’ lives as well, and he had no way to take it back. He kept the mountains. Nobody ever got the years returned.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ōyamatsumi in Japanese mythology?

Ōyamatsumi is the great god of mountains in Japanese mythology, whose name Chamberlain translated as “the Deity Great-Mountain-Possessor.” He is the father of Konohanasakuya-hime and Iwanaga-hime, and through his many daughters he is connected to Susanoo, Ōkuninushi and the imperial line. He is also worshipped as a god of the sea and of war at his head shrine on Ōmishima.

How was Ōyamatsumi born?

The sources disagree. The Kojiki has him born to Izanagi and Izanami as the deity of mountains, listed among the many deities they produced after the islands. The Nihon Shoki gives a variant in which Izanagi cuts the fire god Kagutsuchi into five pieces that become five mountain gods, with the head becoming Ōyamatsumi.

Why is human life short in Japanese mythology?

Because Ninigi rejected Iwanaga-hime. Ōyamatsumi had sent both his daughters to Ninigi, the elder to make the offspring of heaven endure like rock and the younger to make them flourish like blossom. When Ninigi sent the elder back for being ugly and kept only Konohanasakuya-hime, Ōyamatsumi declared that the lives of heaven’s descendants would be frail as flowers, which the Kojiki gives as the reason the sovereigns do not live long.

What is Ōyamatsumi the god of?

He is the god of mountains and everything mountains hold, including timber, ore, water sources and the passes that cross them. At Ōyamazumi Shrine on Ōmishima he is also venerated as a god of the sea and safe passage, and as a god of war to whom samurai prayed for victory. Farmers, woodcutters and mountain ascetics have all counted him as their deity.

Where is Ōyamatsumi worshipped?

His principal shrine is Ōyamazumi Shrine on the island of Ōmishima in the Seto Inland Sea, the highest-ranked shrine of the former province of Iyo and the head of thousands of Mishima and Yamazumi shrines nationwide. Its treasure hall preserves a very large share of Japan’s nationally designated arms and armour, left as thank-offerings by warriors, and the grounds hold camphor trees said to be around 3,000 years old.