Sarutahiko Ōkami

When Ninigi, the heavenly grandson, came down to take possession of the earth, one being was already standing at the crossroads where heaven meets the world.

Enormous. Ruddy-faced. Bearded. Holding a jewelled spear.

And with a long nose.

Sarutahiko — "leader of the earthly kami" — was not attacking, and not hiding. He was standing in the road, blocking the descent, and the whole divine expedition stopped.

Nobody could deal with him

The gods of heaven were, by the account, at a loss. He wouldn't move and nobody wanted to be the one to go and ask.

So they sent Ame-no-Uzume.

Who is the dawn goddess — and, more to the point, the dancer. The one who got the sun goddess out of the cave by climbing onto an upturned tub and performing a dance so outrageous that the assembled gods roared with laughter, and Amaterasu, unable to bear not knowing what was funny, opened the door.

She goes down to the crossroads and confronts him.

And what happens is: they get married.

That's the resolution. The gatekeeper who stopped an army of gods is dealt with by the performer, and the encounter that could have been a war becomes a marriage.

The gentlest border negotiation in Japanese myth, and the only one settled by somebody being funnier than the problem.

He is a serious god

This is worth stating, because he tends to be treated as a footnote to the tengu.

Sarutahiko is one of only seven deities who bear the title Ōkami — "great god." That's a very short list.

He has around two thousand shrines, headed by Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Mie.

He is the patron of misogi — the purification practice, standing under waterfalls and in cold rivers.

And through Ueshiba Morihei's personal devotion to him, he became the patron deity of aikidō — which means a Japanese god of crossroads is, right now, enshrined in martial arts dojos around the world.

Now: the nose

Here's why he sits in a collection about monsters.

He is the standard scholarly nominee for where the tengu got its face.

The great tengu — the daitengu, the red-faced, long-nosed mountain being that everyone can picture — didn't always look like that. Earlier tengu are birds: kites, beaks, wings, talons.

The humanization happened around the fourteenth century. And when the tengu acquired a human face, the face it acquired was red, bearded, and long-nosed.

Which was, by then, an image people had been looking at for centuries: the god at the crossroads.

Go and look at a sarutahiko mask used in kagura performance. It is, to any modern eye, a tengu mask — the same red skin, the same enormous nose.

The difference is entirely in the standing of the thing wearing it.

And his descendants invented the theatre

The Sarume clan are the descendants of Sarutahiko and Ame-no-Uzume.

And they are credited with originating kagura — the sacred dance — and by lineage claim, with the ancestry of Noh.

So the crossroads god and the dance goddess are the mythological parents of Japanese performing arts.

Which puts a surprising amount downstream of one blocked road: the masks that came alive as monsters, the ghost plays, the demon that appears at a maple-viewing party, the whole apparatus.

One last thing about crossroads

His portfolio was absorbed by the dōsojin — the paired stone figures that stand at crossings and village boundaries all over rural Japan. Usually a couple. Often weathered past recognition.

They're there for the same reason he was: a boundary needs somebody standing at it.

And in this tradition, the boundary is where everything happens — which means the first thing the gods of heaven met on arriving in Japan was a road-guardian doing his job, and the whole pantheon had to stop and negotiate.