Working Things Out Since the Age of the Gods
I was walking through the grounds of Izumo Taisha.
I looked up at the great shimenawa rope and continued along the avenue of pine trees.
The deity enshrined here is Ōkuninushi no Ōkami.
In Japanese mythology, he is a remarkably busy god.
He builds the land, helps shape a place where people can live, and eventually gives that land over to the descendants of Amaterasu.
This is the story known as “Kuni-yuzuri,” the transfer of the land.
The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki contain many stories about how Japan came to take shape.
Of course, they cannot simply be read as literal records of historical events. But when they are read as stories, something curious begins to stand out.
The beginning of this country is not told as the story of a single hero swinging a sword and conquering everything in sight.
They talk.
They send a messenger.
They talk again.
They listen to what the other side has to say.
They work out the conditions.
If that fails, they send someone else.
If things still do not come together, they think again.
Reading the story of “Kuni-yuzuri,” these exchanges become oddly noticeable.
There are, of course, moments when force stands in the background.
Even so, what seems to take so much time is not the fighting itself, but how to work things out before and after it.
Perhaps something similar happened again and again as these islands gradually came together into a single country.
Each region would already have had people who ruled there.
They would have had their own gods, their own ancestors, their own pride.
It might have been faster to crush everything.
But that would not have made much of a future.
Join us.
And in return, your place will remain.
This god can continue to be worshipped here.
This family can continue in its old role.
We will give way this far.
But from here, you will follow us.
It is hard not to imagine conversations like these taking place here and there.
Of course, mythology cannot simply be turned into history. But this repeated act of “working things out” that appears again and again in Japanese mythology somehow begins to resemble the way Japanese people still behave today.
Not powerful enough to simply impose their will.
But somehow, they managed to work things out.
So they looked at the other side.
They listened.
They prepared the ground.
They searched for a point of compromise.
They found a way to live with the result.
If those were the kinds of elders who slowly helped bring this country together,
then perhaps the modern Japanese habit of preparing things before a meeting, saving the other person’s face, and finally saying, “Well, shall we settle around here?” is a habit that goes back a very long way.
No, surely that is taking the idea too far.
That is what I think.
And yet, it does not feel entirely wrong.
Walking through the grounds of Izumo Taisha, I found myself thinking about it.
Not just for two thousand years.
Have we been doing this since the age of the gods?
I smiled at the thought―partly because it seemed absurd, and partly because it somehow didn’t.
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