Ōkuninushi

You may already know him as the kind one — the youngest of eighty brothers, the one who stopped to help a skinned hare on the beach at Inaba while the others walked past and gave it advice that made things worse.

The hare, which was a god, told him he would win the princess.

Ōkuninushi.

And that kindness cost him more than any other single act in Japanese mythology.

They killed him. Twice.

The eighty brothers had all wanted the princess. She chose him.

So they took him up a mountain and told him there was a boar coming down, and that his job was to catch it at the bottom.

What came down was a boulder, heated red-hot, shaped like a boar.

He caught it. It killed him.

His mother petitioned the primordial gods, and two clam-goddesses were sent down — one to scrape the shell-powder, one to bring the water — and they treated his burns and brought him back.

(Shellfish, entering Japanese mythology as resurrection medics. It's worth noting that in a tradition where a giant conch also becomes a monster.)

So he came back. And the brothers killed him again.

This time by splitting a great log, wedging it open, and sending him into the gap — and pulling the wedge.

And he was revived a second time.

Then his mother told him to run.

He ran to the underworld

Which is where the story becomes something else entirely.

He fled to Ne-no-kuni, the root land, where Susanoo rules — the storm god, the one who was thrown out of heaven, the one who killed the eight-headed serpent.

And there he met Suseri-hime, Susanoo's daughter, and they fell in love immediately.

Susanoo's response was to put him through four trials, and this section is the most straightforwardly enjoyable stretch in the whole of Japanese myth.

The snake chamber. He's shown to bed in a room full of snakes. Suseri gives him a scarf and tells him to wave it three times. He does. The snakes leave him alone.

The centipede and wasp chamber. Same solution. Another scarf. She's paying attention.

The burning field. Susanoo fires an arrow into a field and sends him to fetch it, then sets the grass alight from every side. He's surrounded. And a mouse appears and tells him the ground below is hollow — he drops through, and the fire passes over him — and then the mouse brings him the arrow.

The delousing. Susanoo has him pick the vermin out of his hair. The vermin are centipedes. So Ōkuninushi chews red clay and nuts, and spits — and Susanoo, seeing what looks like a mouth full of crushed centipedes, is satisfied and falls asleep.

The escape is the best part

While the storm god sleeps, Ōkuninushi ties Susanoo's hair to the rafters of the hall.

Then he picks up Suseri-hime, and takes Susanoo's sword, his bow, and his sacred koto — and runs.

And the koto cries out.

The instrument gives him away. The earth shakes. Susanoo wakes and tears the hall down getting his hair free, and comes after them.

(That singing koto, incidentally, is the ancestor of every later Japanese belief about instruments that develop a will of their own.)

And then Susanoo does the unexpected thing

He chases them to Yomotsu Hirasaka — the slope at the border of the underworld, the same boundary Izanagi fled across with the hags of the dead behind him.

And there, at the edge, half-beaten and half-proud, he stops.

And he shouts his blessing after them.

He names him Ōkuninushi — "Great Land Master" — and grants him the land, and tells him to use the sword he just stole to subdue the brothers.

The trials were never about whether the boy could survive snakes. They were about whether he could take something. And the moment he stole the regalia and the daughter and got away with it, he had passed.

The ending is the doctrine

Much later, the heavens decide they want the land back — the kuni-yuzuri, the transfer.

They send Takemikazuchi, the thunder god (the same one who holds the earthquake catfish down with a stone), and after a confrontation Ōkuninushi agrees to hand over the visible world.

His price is architecture.

He asks for "a magnificent palace."

And he gets Izumo Taisha — one of the oldest and greatest shrines in Japan, where the largest sacred rope in the country hangs, and where by folk tradition every god in Japan gathers each October, leaving the rest of the country godless for a month.

Which is the whole system, at its absolute source.

Japan's answer to a defeated power is never destruction. It's a shrine. The demon king who terrorized a province, the rebel who declared himself emperor, the courtier who came back as lightning — all enshrined, all promoted, all given a job.

And it started here. Even the land's first sovereign was pacified with a building.