Yama-no-kami

The deity behind this tradition's entire mountain wing — and she doesn't stay on the mountain.

In spring, the mountain god comes down and becomes the field god.

In autumn, she goes back up.

One deity, two seasonal job titles, and the agricultural year as her itinerary.

She dislikes beauty

This is the tradition's most humane piece of folk theology and I love it without reservation.

The god is female, and she dislikes beauty — she is said to rejoice when encountering uglier things.

So the offering made to her is the okoze.

Which is a scorpionfish — and if you have never seen one, look it up immediately, because it is genuinely one of the most alarming-looking animals in the sea. Lumpen, warty, spined, with a permanent expression of grievance.

It is prized specifically for its ugliness.

Fishermen and woodsmen presenting the ugliest fish on the coast so that the goddess feels pretty.

That is a god whose insecurity is managed by her worshippers, with a fish. And they do it kindly, and it has been going on for a very long time.

The twelfth of the month

On the 12th, the god counts the trees.

And workers stay out of the mountains.

Because if you go in while the inventory is running, you risk being counted with the timber.

Which is a beautifully specific dread — not eaten, not taken, not cursed. Miscategorized. Entered in the wrong column of a ledger you didn't know was open, by an official who wasn't looking closely.

And it functions, of course, as workplace safety: one guaranteed day a month when nobody is felling anything.

An inventory-day taboo, which is also a rest day, which is also a reason not to be alone on a mountain with an axe.

And there's an exclusion, stated plainly

Women were barred from her festivals, under menstrual-impurity doctrine.

Which is the jealous-goddess complex: a female deity said to resent other women's presence, used to justify keeping them out of forestry, mining, and mountain work.

I'm noting it as the record has it. It's part of what this deity meant in practice, and it excluded real people from real trades for a very long time.

She's the employer of record

Once you have her, the whole mountain wing acquires a landlord.

The tengu-like beings who feed on the smell of roasting food. The old man of the mountain whose shout knocks travellers flat, and who was in some places hired to keep wolves off. The phantom felling heard at night where nothing has been cut. The hunters reserving their last bullet for a specific monster.

All of it happens on her property — and for half the year she isn't there, because she's down in the paddies growing rice.

Which explains the seasonal shape of mountain dread. Winter is when she's home, in her own country, counting. Spring is when the mountain empties of its god and the fields get her instead.

And it's the keystone doctrine, as agronomy

The same being is worshipped as two gods, under two names, on a fixed schedule, by the same people.

Not confusion. Function. She's the mountain when you need the mountain and the field when you need the field, and nobody ever had to reconcile the theology because the calendar did it for them.

Which is also where the one-eyed figures come from, if Yanagita was right.

His thesis — running through a whole family of single-eyed roadside bogeys — is that they are her demoted servants: mountain-god attendants who lost their standing as the worship thinned, and who now turn up on country roads on fixed days, checking on households, half-remembered.

This entry is where that thread was always pointing.