Ōyamatsumi

Ōyamatsumi is the great mountain god, and he is the author of the coldest bargain in Japanese mythology.

The offer

Ninigi — the heavenly grandchild, newly descended to rule the earth — sees Konohanasakuya-hime and asks her father for her hand.

Konohanasakuya means, roughly, "the princess who makes the blossoms bloom." She is beautiful the way cherry blossom is beautiful: completely, and for about a week.

And Ōyamatsumi says yes — and sends both his daughters.

Because there is a second one. Iwanaga-hime — "the princess of the long rocks."

She is not beautiful.

And Ninigi sends her back

He takes the blossom and returns the rock to her father, because she is plain and he does not want her.

And Ōyamatsumi delivers the verdict.

He explains what the package was.

Iwanaga-hime symbolized eternal permanence. She was the rock — the thing that does not change, does not fade, does not end. Marry her, and the line of the heavenly grandchild would have endured like stone.

And Konohanasakuya was the blossom — beauty, flowering, abundance, and the short season that goes with them.

He had offered both.

His son-in-law took one.

And so: the heavenly grandchild's lifespan shall be short.

That's where death comes from

Not from a curse. Not from a punishment. Not from a crime.

From a declined option on a marriage contract.

And this is worth stopping on, because Japanese mythology has other explanations for mortality and they don't work like this at all.

There's the underworld version — Izanami, at the slope of the dead, swearing to kill a thousand people a day because her husband looked at her. That's rage.

There's the food-goddess version — a deity murdered, and the crops growing from her corpse. That's violence, and a trade.

This one is actuarial.

Nobody is angry. Nothing is broken. The father just states, flatly, what the terms had been and what declining them means. Beauty was taken, permanence was refused, and the consequence is that the descendants of that marriage — the emperors, and by extension everybody — live short lives.

Human mortality as a forfeited rider. The tradition's only myth about death that reads like a contract review.

And the shrine collects armour

His head sanctuary is Ōyamazumi Shrine on Ōmishima, in Ehime, in the Inland Sea.

And for centuries, warriors dedicated their armour there.

The result is that the shrine's treasury holds the greatest collection of Japanese armour in the country — a very large share of everything designated nationally as a treasure in that category, in one building, on one island, because generation after generation of fighting men brought their gear to the mountain god before or after a campaign.

Which produces a quiet irony worth naming.

Every one of those warriors was asking the mountain-father to postpone the very deadline his own verdict set.

He is the reason human life is short. He is also who you petition when you're about to go out and risk what's left of yours.

One more portfolio

Among his other roles, Ōyamatsumi is a sake deity.

So he holds both ends of it: he priced the lifespan, and he patronizes the drink you have during it.

The rock was on the table. Somebody chose the flower.