Amatsukami and Kunitsukami
Decoding the Kuniyuzuri of Japanese Mythology
The Kuniyuzuri [国譲り] recorded in Japanese mythology is a story centered on Izumo Taisha, the grand shrine built in the city of Izumo in Shimane Prefecture. It is also a memory of events that occurred in ancient Japan. The founding dates of the great majority of Japanese shrines are unknown. The oldest among them trace their origins to the “age of the gods,” and mythology serves as their basis. Izumo Taisha is one of these ancient shrines. Its founding is grounded in mythology, and to this day its chief priest belongs to a clan whose authority derives from that mythology. This is an extraordinarily rare circumstance.
When the Meiji era began in 1868, the new rulers of the Meiji government set about negating the entire Edo period in order to lend legitimacy to the hegemony they had seized from the Tokugawa shogunal house through violent revolution. The target was the Japanese-style Confucianism that had wielded immense influence during the Edo period. The government was searching for a new philosophical foundation for the regime. Buddhism had built an era of its own but had rapidly lost its power after the onset of the Edo period. Confucianism was too closely associated with the Edo era to adopt. It was at this point that the Meiji government turned its attention to Shinto. But Shinto had no clear definition then and has none now, and the Meiji government adopted it without understanding it. Only one thing can be said with certainty. The Meiji government adopted something other than Buddhism or Confucianism. This new direction would later transform into Shrine Shinto and State Shinto, opening the curtain on a complex modern history of Shinto.
Having decided to adopt Shinto as the philosophical basis of the new regime, the Meiji government next began demanding centralized control over Shinto. But Shinto, though its origins are uncertain, possessed prototypical forms of faith that long predated the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Even today the gods are called Yaoyorozu (the myriad deities). The faiths associated with these countless gods exist in as many forms as there are places on the Japanese archipelago and in as many forms as there are natural phenomena. They are far beyond the capacity of any central government to manage in a unified manner. But because this would not serve the new government’s purposes, two coercive measures were imposed. These were the Prohibition of Hereditary Shrine Priesthood in 1871 and the Shrine Consolidation Order of 1906.
Historically the management of shrines took many forms. A specific clan might serve as chief priest and venerate the deity, or a village community might collectively maintain the rites. But at major shrines governing entire regions the influence was powerful enough to resist even government directives. The priestly clans of shrines with particularly ancient origins were assumed to hold lineages spanning more than a thousand years, and because their historical relationships with the imperial house were also involved, they maintained immense influence in their local communities. The Meiji government sought to nullify this regional influence of the shrines and bring them under central control. Its method was to prohibit hereditary succession and thereby absorb faith into the bureaucratic apparatus. This was carried out from the perspective of creating a national populace, which was indispensable to the modern state. As a result, the great majority of shrines lost their regional influence and many were excluded from shrine administration.
Having confirmed the effectiveness of dismantling the influence of major shrines and placing them under centralized management, the Meiji government then moved to concentrate faith entirely within the state. This was the second measure, the Shrine Consolidation Order. It aimed to forcibly merge and reorganize the diverse shrines that had been dispersed across the land into a system manageable by the central government. In essence it was a measure for bureaucratic administration. What matters is that both measures used faith and Shinto as their pretext while the substance was the establishment of a modern bureaucratic system.
These two acts of state-level destruction caused the ancient faiths to enter a state of unease. But without these measures, something as undefinable as Shinto could not have been deployed as a state philosophy. Through this process the great majority of shrines had their hereditary priesthoods prohibited and expelled. The vacancies were filled by central government officials. Eventually the situation reached the point where qualification as a shrine priest required a degree from a Shinto university, and today ninety-nine percent of shrine priests are people who came through this system. But even in such an era, a small number of shrines possessed the authority to refuse the government’s demands. The foremost among them was Izumo Taisha. The clan of Izumo Taisha managed to survive the impact of the Meiji-era prohibition on hereditary succession. In accordance with customs dating to antiquity, a specific clan continues to serve as chief priest through hereditary succession to this day.
This is not possible through mere historical antiquity alone. It requires having gathered deep faith from the local community and having earned the people’s strong trust. In my own experience, having visited countless shrines across Japan, no shrine inspires faith as deep as Izumo Taisha. It remains a source of spiritual support for a great many Japanese people. Geographically it stands in a remote area far from the major cities, yet I visit once a year to pay my respects.
The fact that a small number of shrines survived the pressure of the Meiji government and continue their hereditary succession to this day transmits the strength and resilience of the faith that the Japanese once held. What then is the origin of Izumo Taisha, a shrine of such extraordinary spiritual power?
Regrettably this is almost never discussed. In this piece I will draw on perspectives developed through my own research and unravel the story by crossing mythology with ancient history.