Who Is Sarutahiko? The Kami Who Guided Ninigi, at Tsubaki and Ise

At the eight-forking road between heaven and the Central Land of Reed Plains, a figure blocks the way. Light pours from him, upward to the High Plain of Heaven and downward to the earth. In the Nihon Shoki's telling, none of the eighty myriad kami can bring themselves to face him. One goddess is sent, and he answers her. He is not an enemy. He has come to guide the grandchild of the sun goddess down to the land he already knows. This page looks at that meeting, at the one record of how he died, and at two shrines where he is honored today, and it asks which parts rest on text and which on later tradition.

The meeting at the crossroads

Both chronicles tell the scene, with different emphases. Their details are compared below.

"I am an Earthly Deity named the Deity Prince of Saruta." Chamberlain, Kojiki (1882), Sect. XXXIII, p. 108.

The scene belongs to the descent of Ninigi, whom Amaterasu sends down. The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that Uzume was valued as a negotiator with new and unknown beings. It adds that another Nihon Shoki variant has her warn Amaterasu when Susanoo approaches heaven again after his banishment. In Aston's version of the crossroads scene she bares her chest and meets Sarutahiko with a mocking laugh, and he answers plainly.

What the sources disagree about

Translators do not agree on how large he was. Aston renders the length of his back as more than seven fathoms, while the Encyclopedia of Shinto gives a height of over seven feet. Both give his nose as seven hands or spans.

The name is also unsettled. Aston glosses it as "monkey-field". Chamberlain agrees that this is the literal sense but says Saruta is more likely a place name. So "monkey" is one reading, not a settled meaning.

They differ again on who carries his name onward. The Kojiki says the women of the Sarume line bear it, and Aston's footnote notes that the Kojiki gives the title to females alone, while the Nihon Shoki's wording covers male and female lords alike. Aston, writing in 1896, took the Sarume to be women who danced for the gods and called those dances an origin of later kagura and Noh. That is his reading, not a statement of the chronicles. The Encyclopedia of Shinto instead ties the Sarume clan to the spirit-pacifying rite chinkonsai, citing a later text, the Kogo Shui.

Drowned at Azaka

Only the Kojiki tells how he died. While living at Azaka in Ise, he went fishing and a shellfish caught his hand. He drowned. His spirit received three names as it sank, rose and burst into bubbles. Uzume then escorted him back, gathered the fishes and asked whether they would serve the heavenly grandchild. Only the sea cucumber stayed silent, and she slit its mouth.

The Encyclopedia of Shinto records the Ujitoko clan of Ise as his descendants. It adds that in the Tokugawa period the Suika school of Shinto took him as the ancestor of its teaching.

Ise and the Uji family

Sarutahiko Shrine in Ise describes him as the kami who appears at the start of things and guides everything toward the best. Its official page says he returned to the upper Isuzu River after guiding Ninigi and opened that land. It then cites an early Ise record, the Kotai Jingu Gishikicho, saying that Ota no Mikoto, an ancestor of the Uji family and Sarutahiko's descendant, recommended the Uji area to Yamatohime. The Inner Shrine was built there. The shrine's priests are, by its account, his direct descendants, and it keeps a separate shrine to Uzume. That is the shrine's own history. It is a living tradition, not an independent record.

Tsubaki Grand Shrine and the claim of age

Tsubaki Grand Shrine at the foot of the Suzuka mountains in Mie calls Sarutahiko the ancestral kami of guidance. Its homepage presents the shrine as the oldest in Japan, with two thousand years of history, and as the head shrine of his worship nationwide. It also describes a lion-dance prayer rite handed down for about 1,300 years and designated an intangible folk cultural property of Mie Prefecture.

Wikipedia is more careful. It says the shrine's legend dates the founding to about 3 BCE, in the reign of Emperor Suinin, but that there is no documentary evidence for this. It cites an entry dated 748 as the earliest written mention, says the shrine was named head of roughly 2,000 Sarutahiko shrines in 1935, and notes that a second Suzuka shrine disputes Tsubaki's standing as the province's first shrine. Read the founding date as the shrine's tradition.

How to read a shrine's claim

Ask three things before trusting a founding date or a title:

• Is it dated by a document, or by the shrine's own account?
• Do the court chronicles mention the place, or only the kami?
• Does another shrine claim the same rank?

By that test, the crossroads scene is early and textual. The drowning is a single Kojiki source. The founding dates of both shrines are traditions.

Common mix-ups

• "He is a monkey deity." The name has been read as "monkey-field", but Chamberlain leans toward a place name, so the animal reading is not settled.
• "He opposes the descent." In both chronicles he comes to meet Ninigi and offer himself as vanguard.
• "The chronicles say he and Uzume married." In the passages consulted, she escorts him and takes his name as a title. Some modern summaries add a marriage, but it does not appear in those passages.
• "Tsubaki is his only major shrine." Sarutahiko Shrine in Ise is also a prominent place of his worship, served by his claimed descendants.