Here she stays, watching over the precious rice crop, until the harvest is completed in early autumn. The Goddess leaves the mountains and takes up residence on the dikes between the paddies. In early spring, when the rice paddies are ready for planting, she morphs into the Ta no Kami or Rice Goddess. When we go boar hunting, we humbly ask the goddess to share some of her bounty with us.”Ī yama no kami marker (courtesy fudosama.blogspot - see link below)īut ruling over the mountains and forest creatures are not the Mountain Goddess’ only task. “The wild boars we hunt do not belong to us.” The old hunter explained. The great storywriter and folklorist Muku Hatoju once accompanied a traditional wild boar hunter on a trip deep into the mountains along the border of Kagoshima and Miyazaki Prefectures. Men who work in the mountains revere the Yama no Kami as the ultimate life force animating the forests and the plants and animals that live there. The Mountain Goddess, or Yama no Kami, is a Diana-like ruler of lands where men live by hunting wild boar or black bear, or by felling trees or gathering herbs. This is a story that is widely told in southern Kyushu, but has similar versions in other areas of the country. One of my favorite Japanese folklore themes is the Mountain Goddess and the Devil Stinger. Man’s survival is an age-old matter of flattering the Mountain Goddessīy Kevin Short / Special to The Japan News August 19, 2014 Though not so common now, they can still be found however, and the concept remains a living tradition in rural parts as Short’s article makes plain. This is the one worshipped by hunters and foresters.įollowing the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan*s shrines were realigned along imperial lines and many of the rural shrines honouring nameless ‘yama no kami’ or ‘ta no kami’ were merged into larger entities. However, as Kevin Short points out, there is another form of mountain kami which remains in her realm throughout the year. In autumn, following the harvest, it returns to the hills where it spends the winter. The usual understanding is that the mountain kami morphs into the rice-field kami in spring, descending with the nourishing mountain streams to feed the rice-paddies as it were. These are linked to Japan’s rice culture, held to underpin the very essence of early Shinto. In a recent column for the Japan News, which can be accessed here, he writes of the tradition of ‘yama no kami’ (mountain kami) and ‘ta no kami’ (ricefield kami). Green Shinto has featured before the writings of naturalist Kevin Short, who combines his research of Japanese flora and fauna with explorations into folklore. A shrine to Yama no kami (photo by Lee Ratt)
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