Oshira-sama

In the households of Tōhoku, the god comes in pairs.

Two wooden dolls, about thirty centimetres, carved from mulberry wood. One male or horse-faced, one female.

And they are wrapped in layer upon layer of cloth garments — a new one added every festival, so that an old pair is a thick soft bundle, the faces barely showing, generations deep.

They live in the alcove. And behind them is one of the hardest stories in Japanese folklore.

The founding tragedy

A farmer's daughter loved the family horse.

Not as a girl loves an animal. The story is explicit that they became intimate, and it does not soften it.

When her father found out, he killed the horse and hung its body from a mulberry tree.

And his daughter went out to it, and clung to the body, weeping, and would not let go.

So he took an axe and beheaded the horse.

And the daughter rose into the sky with the horse's head, and the two of them ascended together and became Oshira-sama.

And then she came back to teach them a trade

This is the turn that makes it, and it's the reason this entry sits where it does.

After the ascension, she appeared to her parents in dreams.

And what she taught them was sericulture. How to raise silkworms. How to feed them, tend them, unwind the cocoons.

The origin of silk.

Look at what the grief became

In almost every other story of this kind, violent death produces a ghost. A grudge. Something that comes back to settle a score, and has to be appeased with rites and shrines and formal apology.

Here, the grief becomes an industry.

And the loop is so tight it's almost unbearable when you lay it out:

The silkworms eat mulberry leaves.

Mulberry is the wood the dolls are carved from.

The silkworms' thread becomes the cloth the dolls are dressed in — more of it every year.

The god who was killed on a mulberry tree teaches her family to feed worms on mulberry, so they can weave the cloth to wrap the mulberry-wood body she now lives in.

That isn't decoration. That's a household economy, a religion, and a mourning, all built out of one tree.

The layers are the theology

Each festival, the dolls get a fresh garment — laid over the old ones, never replacing them.

So the god's body is accumulated worship. You can read the household's devotion in the thickness of the bundle. A pair that's been in a family for a century is enormously padded, and every layer is a year somebody remembered.

A god who gets warmer the longer the family keeps faith.

The practice, as it runs

Festival days fall on the 16th of the 1st, 3rd, and 9th lunar months. The dolls are dressed, and there are recitations.

And the itako — the blind mediums of Tōhoku — perform oshirasōbase, which translates as something like "playing the gods": taking a doll in each hand and moving them while chanting.

The offerings have prohibitions, and they're pointed. No meat of two- or four-footed animals. No eggs.

Violations bring illness, or facial disfigurement.

Which is exactly right, when you think about what the myth mourns. The god's table is kept clean of killed animals.

And there's a heavier clause: abandoning the worship brings curses on the family. This is a relationship you cannot resign from. The god came into the house through a catastrophe and does not accept notice.

The dolls have a career

At Kudoji temple in Hirosaki, Aomori, there's an annual rite each May 15–16 — the Oshira-kō.

Households bring their doll pairs to the temple, and the dolls receive stamped certifications, which are believed to elevate the deities' spiritual rank.

It has been designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property since 1999.

A household god with a promotion system. The family takes its deity in, gets it credentialled, and brings it home ranked higher than it left.

The dolls accrue rank as they accrue garments — and worship becomes a career the family manages on the god's behalf.

And it was written down

The Oshira-sama reached the wider world through Yanagita Kunio's *Tōno Monogatari* (1910) and its follow-up (1935) — the book that founded Japanese folklore studies, made out of what one man in Tōno told him.

There is a Chinese antecedent worth flagging honestly: a tale in the Soushenji about a girl and a horse-skin that turns into a silkworm. Whether Tōhoku received it or arrived independently is an open question, and I'd rather leave it open.

What isn't in question is what the north did with it: took the worst thing that could happen in a farmhouse and turned it into cloth, and a god, and something to do every sixteenth day.