#okuninushi

Kamisama Kiss

Some visual support I'm pretty fond of for a modern au fic I wrote for the like 3 other Okuninushi/Masakado enjoyers out there. They're MMA fighters and worthy ✨rivals✨

I had posted this [https://mashounen2003.tumblr.com/post/792543572422524928] some months ago, proposing a way Sanae Kochiya's family tree could be drastically expanded by the events of Touhou 20, and all the funny fan-theorising and speculation on the Moriya Shrine's family dynamics within that post actually made me think even more about Kanako Yasaka and her exact relation with her mythological basis.

The inspiration for Kanako was the official lore of the Suwa Grand Shrine and its main deity, Suwa (Dai) Myoujin –the (Great) Deity of the Suwa region–, a title held by Takeminakata after defeating Moreya according to the legend. In turn, Takeminakata is usually placed in the Shintou pantheon's family tree as one of Oukuninushi's sons; more precisely, he's the younger brother of Kotoshironushi, one of the deities claimed as the divine ancestors of the Japanese imperial family. Takeminakata was married to Yasakatome, who was enshrined as a secondary deity at the Suwa Grand Shrine; to be more precise, Takeminakata is enshrined at the Upper Shrine of that whole shrine complex, whereas Yasakatome is at the Lower Shrine. However, there's not a lot of stuff about Yasakatome other than her marriage with Takeminakata, and out of those few bits of available info on her origin, we can't really point to one version and say it's the main one.

So, with how many elements have been pulled straight from the Suwa Myoujin lore to build both Kanako's backstory and her in-universe motivations, such as her dislike of the Lunarians referencing Takeminakata's failed attempt at defying the heavenly kami, it seems evident at first glance that she's meant to be (in typical Touhou fashion) a gender-swapped version of Takeminakata. The details recently revealed in Touhou 20 about Yuiman Asama being an old friend of Kanako seem to strengthen this idea a bit more, since Yuiman's backstory is pretty much a copy of the role of Princess Yuiman/Yuima in the legend of Kouga Saburou, which was meant to be an alternative origin story for Suwa Myoujin and whose titular character is supposed to be Takeminakata long before he was known for that name and deified & enshrined at Suwa.

The one big obstacle for the "Kanako = Takeminakata" idea is a little thing mentioned back in early 2009 and never referenced again: in one of the chapters of the official manga Silent Sinner in Blue, it's mentioned that Oukuninushi (interchangeably referred to as Oukuninushi and Daikoku, a Buddhist deity and one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, who ended up being "merged" with Oukuninushi as part of the Shin-Butsu Shuugou, the syncretism between Shintou and Buddhism) was sealed by the Lunarians at the Izumo Grand Shrine to ensure he couldn't rebel against them, it's suggested that Takeminakata was also sealed at the Moriya Shrine for the same reason, and that the Lunarians restrained them by using shimenawa (like the small circular one Kanako wears as a crown or tiara and the big circular one she carries on her back, and also the particularly thick one hanging at the door of the Moriya Shrine, which is itself inspired by the real-life autumn shrine of the Lower Shrine of Suwa).

Now, we could dismiss this as some stray piece of lore that was then immediately ignored and is doomed to be eventually overwritten/retconned in a later Touhou story written by ZUN (either a game or another print work like Silent Sinner in Blue), or we could argue that this story about Oukuninushi and Takeminakata might be in-universe misinformation, or that ZUN simply dropped this off somewhere during one of his regular trips to the Dangerous Drunk Dimension (seriously, explaining any contradiction in Touhou Project by merely saying "ZUN was drunk when he wrote that" feels like the equivalent of "Araki forgot" in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and I'm still not sure whether that would be amusing or aggravating). But any of these options would be boring, so let's proceed with the assumption that what was told in Silent Sinner in Blue can be taken at face value and is indeed canon in the way it was told in the text itself: Takeminakata is a character in Touhou Project and was imprisoned in the Moriya Shrine by the Lunarians.

If Takeminakata is currently still sealed within the Moriya Shrine (which reminds me a lot of Mima being sealed within the Hakurei Shrine in the PC-98 era, now that I think about it), then who and what is Kanako, given that she can go outside of the Moriya Shrine grounds and run around in Gensoukyou?

One of the options I considered is that Kanako is actually Yasakatome, albeit only two elements of Kanako are specific references to her: the surname "Yasaka" and the origin myth of the geyser at Shimosuwa, the latter being a possible but vague inspiration for the plot of Touhou 11 (there's also the Perfectly Clear Mirror that Kanako wears in her chest, but the original Suwa Myoujin myths say that it belonged to Takeminakata, and the only clue ponting to the mirror being Yasakatome's is the legend of Kouga Saburou, where Princess Kasuga originally owned a mirror; more details on Kasuga later). But I greatly doubt "Kanako = Yasakatome" is the answer now, for two main reasons:

The first one comes from an entirely out-of-universe perspective. When I said earlier that there's very little information about Yasakatome, that was an understatement: she's not even mentioned in the most comprehensive compilations of Japanese mythology, like the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki; the stories about the Suwa Grand Shrine do mention her but it's all about describing her relationship with Takeminakata and a little bit about her own role as the secondary god enshrined there, and since I've brought up the tale of Kouga Saburou earlier, that one doesn't clarify anything either and simply establishes that Princess Kasuga (whom Kouga Saburou was engaged in the first place and eventually married with) was the human deified alongside Takeminakata at Suwa and known under the name of Yasakatome after the events narrated in that legend. As such, creating a character based on her would require insane amounts of bibliographic research, and even if you were willing to take your braincells to the absolute limit while doing that research, it's very likely you'll eventually be forced to write the equivalent of your own fanfiction centred on a background character in the source material just so you can then pretend this fanfiction is totally authentic and base at least half of your character's lore on that (admittedly, it'd not be the first time or the only place where someone takes this apporach when making significant contributions to mythology; this was already done even more blatantly in Graeco-Roman mythology when Virgil wrote the Aeneid). Doing this much work for a character in something such as a Touhou game doesn't sound very practical, and even though ZUN has created other characters based on very obscure Japanese myths and folk tales, what was available about them is indeed barely known and hard to find for the general public but was still enough to make an entire Touhou character out of them (case in point, the aforementioned Yuiman Asama).

The second reason comes from the few things that are known about Yasakatome, and how much any of those bits of info clashes with both Takeminakata's lore and what was already established about Kanako in Touhou canon: there are two main accepted versions of Yasakatome's genealogy (none of them come from chronicles like the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, and they don't come from the official lore of the Suwa Grand Shrine either), and both of them would result in a Touhou version of Yasakatome being friendly towards the Lunarians rather than opposing them like Kanako. One version linked to the ancient sea-faring Azumi tribe (who originated on the island of Kyushu, pretty far from Lake Suwa in Nagano) claims that Yasakatome is one of the daughters of the sea deity Watatsumi, thus making her a sister of Toyotama-hime and Tamayori-hime; if Kanako was based on this, then she'd be straight-up a Lunarian and also a third Watatsuki sister along with Toyohime and Yorihime. A much more recent version (from the Edo period, which started around the year 1600) claims that Yasakatome is the daughter of a heavenly kami called Yasakahiko, who accompanied Nigihayahi when he descended from heaven.

The simplest (and probably most boring) explanation I can think of is that Kanako is the daughter of Takeminakata and Yasakatome. Any past or present romantic interaction between Kanako and Yuiman would get weird if this were the case (though it'd still be less weird than the fully literal incest in the heavenly kami's family tree, such as Tamayori-hime with her own biological nephew), but at least, it'd easily avoid the issues stemmed from Kanako and her portrayal seemingly contradicting what was revealed and/or is implied about Takeminakata and Yasakatome (with the Touhou version of the former being technically a prisoner within his own shrine and the Touhou version of the latter being probably a Lunarian).

Another possibility is that Kanako is Takeminakata and Yasakatome themselves, in a more literal sense, rather than being their offspring: if Takeminakata and Yasakatome were perceived and worshipped by their own followers as two facets of one kami that ruled over the Suwa region and was enshrined in the entire Suwa Grand Shrine, that belief could lead to both disappearing and being reborn as Kanako Yasaka, an amalgamation of them and an embodiment of the whole idea of a "great deity of the Suwa region"; this wouldn't be too difficult, given how little info on Yasakatome is available, how much she's remembered as merely Takeminakata's wife, and the fact that both the Upper and Lower Suwa Shrines each have buildings dedicated to both kami.

This would be contradicted by what was told in Silent Sinner in Blue about Takeminakata and what was figured out earlier in this post about Yasakatome's Lunarian connection, but that could be solved with a set of fan-theories proposed by @occasionaltouhou (and my own conclusions inspired by those theories) regarding the relation between the heavenly kami in Japanese mythology and the Lunarians in Touhou, Iwanaga-hime's possible role in Gensoukyou (at least before Ariya Iwanaga was introduced in Touhou 20), and the general concept of a kami being embodied by a physical object and partitioning its own spirit/essence so it can be worshipped from multiple separate places:

First of all, most if not all kami have a go-shintai –literally the "sacred body of a kami"–, a temporary repository of said kami's spirit; this go-shintai is usually kept in a private honden or "main hall", but some of the older shrines in Japan weren't built with a honden and the go-shintai of the kami to whom the shrine in question is dedicated is the shrine's high priest (back when that position was hederitary and in the hands of a priestly clan) and/or a pre-existing natural object. This is the case for the "mountain kami" such as the sisters Konohana-Sakuya-hime and Iwanaga-hime, linked respectively to Mount Fuji and the Yatsugatake mountain range; regarding the Touhou canon, Iwanaga-hime's relation to the Yatsugatake mountains inspired @occasionaltouhou's theory about her role in Gensoukyou [https://occasionaltouhou.tumblr.com/post/732913388035915776], since that mountain range is the location of Youkai Mountain, one of Gensoukyou's landmarks (probably the most important one). Suwa Myoujin also has several of these "natural go-shintai", including Mount Moriya behind the Upper Shrine's main shrine, a sacred rock known as iwakura in the main shrine itself, a burial mound in the Upper Shrine's old shrine that is believed to be the resting place of Takeminakata and Yasakatome, and a couple of sacred trees in the Lower Shrine; back when the members of the Suwa clan held the position of Ouhouri or high priest of the Suwa Grand Shrine, they were also revered as living go-shintai of Suwa Myoujin.

Related to the go-shintai and how it works, the Shintou processes of kanjou (originally a Buddhist concept) and bunrei or wakemitama –where the spirit or essence of a kami is partitioned and the resulting "divided spirit" (the literal translation of both bunrei and wakemitama) is moved and re-enshrined somewhere else (usually a miniature household altar) so the kami can propagate and be worshipped there too– were referenced by a piece of Touhou lore in Strange and Bright Nature Deity and at the beginning of Silent Sinner in Blue [https://mashounen2003.tumblr.com/post/806214114154266625]. @occasionaltouhou was inspired by Strange and Bright Nature Deity and Silent Sinner in Blue, along with Touhou 18 introducing Misumaru Tamatsukuri (a character based on Tama-no-Oya, a heavenly kami with an important role in the myth of Amaterasu hiding in a cave), to propose that each heavenly kami has two separate incarnations in the Touhou universe: one of them moved to the Moon to help build the Lunar Capital, while the other one is still living their own life somewhere in Gensoukyou like Misumaru [https://mashounen2003.tumblr.com/post/806186762832592896].

For Yasakatome, either the Touhou version of her was no longer loyal to the Lunar Capital when she married Takeminakata (and depending on which origin story is applied here, she was either a sort of "estranged third sister" of Toyohime & Yorihime or a rebellious daughter of Yasakahiko), or we can apply the second theory of @occasionaltouhou that I mentioned here: there's a Yasakatome in the Moon (who's either still living with her other two Watatsuki sisters or working with/for her father Yasakahiko), and another Yasakatome in Gensoukyou, born from the idea of her being Suwa Myoujin's wife, who fused with Takeminakata and created Kanako through the process I already described.

As for Takeminakata, we can apply the first theory, but it's going to require a few more steps and a small digression. Based on the concepts of kanjou and bunrei, the lore introduced in Strange and Bright Nature Deity and the theory about Iwanaga-hime's role in Gensoukyou due to Youkai Mountain being her go-shintai, I had come up with another theory that could conciliate this with Ariya Iwanaga's appearance in Touhou 20 [https://mashounen1945.tumblr.com/post/806376826374160384]: even though Ariya was sealed by the Lunarians, the Yatsugatake mountain range was still there and acting as her go-shintai, it eventually became the basis for Youkai Mountain in Gensoukyou, and the pyramid where Ariya was sealed was right below it; it's possible that Yukari and the other Sages used the Yatsugatake mountains as a substitute to summon her spirit and make use of her power of permanence in order to create Youkai Mountain and the rest of Gensoukyou, even though Ariya herself could only feel or maybe witness this ritual without being able to control it or actively take part on it. Takeminakata, with his many natural go-shintai in and around the Suwa Grand Shrine, could have circumvented the seal placed on him by the Lunarians and participated in a ritual where a replica of his spirit (created through kanjou and bunrei, as described earlier) merged with Yasakatome and allowed the resulting "gestalt kami" to exist outside of the seal; the "gestalt kami" in question would be Kanako, and depending of when this merge happened, Kanako could have kept using the identities of Takeminakata and Yasakatome as alter-egos to build the Suwa Myoujin cult and mythology around.

So yeah, this is the new crazy theory I concocted about Kanako's origin. Let me know what you think, and I might be able to come up with something else.

--------------------------------------------------

Addendum:

a-z myths:  okuninushi (japanese mythology)