Yato-no-kami

Also Known As: 夜刀の神, “the kami of the valleys”; yato or yatsu is an eastern Japanese dialect word for a narrow spring-fed valley, written here with characters chosen for sound rather than sense
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: They swarm the wild valleys in numbers, hold the water and the uncleared ground against cultivation, and end the bloodline of anyone who lays eyes on them.
Role in Mythos: They are the resident deities of the reed valleys of old Hitachi, whose territory had to be divided by oath and marked with a staff before rice could be planted there.
Relation to Humans: Farmers who broke new paddy in their valleys had to fight them, then bargain with them and serve them as priests in perpetuity. The bargain worked, and the family that struck it kept the rites for roughly two hundred years down to the day the arrangement was written into the province’s official gazetteer.

The reeds in that valley came up past a man’s chest, and they moved when there was no wind. The compilers of the official gazetteer of Hitachi Province, working in the early 720s for readers who lived elsewhere, thought the local usage strange enough to explain: in the speech of this country, they wrote, snakes are called yato-no-kami. Their bodies are the bodies of snakes. They have horns on their heads.

The gloss is dropped in as a parenthesis, the way a modern editor might explain a regional word for a farm implement, and it sits inside one of the strangest boundary disputes in early Japanese writing. The yato-no-kami were not rare and they were not distant. The gazetteer says plainly that they lived in very great numbers in the open country beside the district seat, in what is now Namegata City in Ibaraki. They were also lethal in a peculiarly total way. If they were driven off and someone saw them going, that person’s household was broken: the gate ruined, no children after. Not a death. An extinction, applied to the whole line at once.

The name has been misread abroad for a long time. The characters used to write it, 夜 and 刀, mean night and blade, and English accounts sometimes translate the term as gods of the night sword, which is atmospheric and wrong. The scribes were spelling a sound. Yato, or yatsu, is an eastern word for exactly the kind of place these beings inhabit: a narrow valley with a spring at its head, wet at the bottom, wooded on the slopes. The yato-no-kami are the gods of the valleys. They are named after real estate.

The trouble started in the reign of the emperor who ruled from the Tamaho palace at Iware, in the first decades of the sixth century. A man called Matachi, of the Yahazu, cut back the grass and reed of the valley west of the district and began turning it into new paddy. The kami came for him. They arrived together, filling the ground, ranging themselves to his left and his right, and no rice went in. That is what they exist to do. They occupied the wet ground the way water occupies it, without hurry, and the work stopped.

Matachi lost his temper. He put on armour, took up a spear himself rather than sending anyone else, and killed and drove them uphill. Then he did the thing the whole story turns on. At the mouth of the mountain he planted a great staff in the boundary ditch and spoke to the kami he had just been fighting. Above this line, he said, is granted to be the land of the gods. Below this line shall be made the fields of men. From now on I will serve as your priest and honour you for all time. Do not curse us. Do not hold it against us. He raised a shrine and made the first offering there, and afterwards opened a little over ten chō of paddy in the valley bottom. His descendants took the rites over from him one after another, and the gazetteer notes, with the particular satisfaction of an official confirming that a thing is still running, that the offerings had not lapsed.

A century and more later, a second man tried a harder version of the same thing. Mibu no Muraji Maro, who had founded Namekata district in the middle of the seventh century, claimed the valley and set labour crews to raise an embankment for a pond. The kami climbed the chinquapin trunks at the water’s edge, settled in the branches and did not leave. Time passed and they were still there. Maro shouted up at them. This pond is being repaired to keep the people alive, he said, so what god is this, what earthly deity, that will not yield to the imperial transformation. Then he turned to the conscripted workmen and told them that whatever they saw, fish or crawling thing, they were to kill it all and fear nothing. The uncanny snakes went into hiding as he finished speaking. The pond kept the name Shii-i, the chinquapin well, for the trees around it and the clean spring that fed it.

Snakes carry water in Japanese religion more often than they carry anything else, and both halves of the story are arguments about water: who holds the spring at the head of the valley, how far up the paddy may creep, whether the wet ground belongs to the field or to the wild. The folklorist Akasaka Norio read Matachi’s staff as the instrument that cuts an inside from an outside, a tool of settlement rather than of worship, and the text supports him. The line is drawn first. The shrine comes after.

There is a serious objection to taking the violence at face value. Shida Jun’ichi, writing in the prefectural history of Ibaraki, pointed out that the Hitachi gazetteer is soaked in the Confucian sensibility of its compilers, and argued that a kami powerful enough to end a bloodline was precisely the land-spirit on whom the harvest depended, so nobody in the sixth century would have gone into the reeds to kill one. Maro is a harder case still: as provincial governor he was obliged by office to worship the deity of the land he administered, which makes the order to slaughter everything in sight read less like memory and more like editing. On Shida’s account the original tale had Matachi prosper because he revered the yato-no-kami, and the rebuke Maro delivers is aimed past the snakes at the local officials who still did. The stories disagree, and the disagreement is about what kind of country Hitachi was supposed to be.

What the yato-no-kami can do is stop cultivation, hold a valley, gather in numbers at short notice, and destroy a family through the eyes. What they cannot do is win. They can be pushed above a line and held there by a staff, an oath and a promise of offerings, and the second time they are simply shouted out of the trees by a man invoking the authority of the court. They are bound to their ground in a way that armed men are not. A small shrine to them survives at Tamatsukuri-kō in Namegata City, a subordinate hall in the precinct of the Atago shrine, in the valley where the argument happened. The pond has no confirmed site left. Matachi’s side of the bargain has been kept for thirteen hundred years, which is the only part of it anyone can check.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Yato-no-kami?

The Yato-no-kami are snake deities from the Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki, the official gazetteer of Hitachi Province compiled in the early eighth century. They have the bodies of snakes and horns on their heads, and they lived in large numbers in the reed valleys around the district seat in what is now Namegata City, Ibaraki Prefecture. The gazetteer states that in local speech the word for snake was simply yato-no-kami.

What does the name Yato-no-kami mean?

It means the kami of the valleys. Yato, also yatsu, is an eastern Japanese dialect word for a narrow, spring-fed valley, which is exactly the terrain these deities inhabit. The characters used to write it were chosen for their sound, so the English rendering “gods of the night sword” is an artefact of the writing system rather than a translation of the meaning.

What happened if you saw a Yato-no-kami?

Seeing one destroyed your entire household. The gazetteer says that if the deities were being driven off and a person laid eyes on them, that person’s family line was ruined and left without descendants. The danger was to the bloodline rather than to the individual.

How did Yahazu no Matachi deal with the Yato-no-kami?

Matachi first fought them and then negotiated with them. He put on armour, took up a spear, killed and drove the deities uphill, then planted a large staff in the boundary ditch at the foot of the mountain and declared that everything above it was the land of the gods and everything below it was the fields of men. He promised to serve as their priest forever if they refrained from cursing him, built them a shrine, and his descendants maintained the offerings for generations.

Do the Yato-no-kami still have a shrine?

Yes. A small shrine identified with the Yato-no-kami stands at Tamatsukuri-kō in Namegata City, Ibaraki Prefecture, as a subordinate shrine within the precinct of the Atago shrine, in the valley where the story is set. The pond built by Mibu no Muraji Maro has no confirmed surviving site.