Who Is Susanoo? The Storm Kami, the Serpent and the Sword

In a wooded valley in Izumo, a tall cedar hall stands behind a prayer hall. The Japan Tourism Agency's shrine database says this place has long been thought of as the true home of the kami Susanoo, and that his spirit is believed to fill the whole valley.

It is a surprising address for the figure the chronicles show weeping until the mountains wither, ruining his sister's rice fields and being driven out of heaven. The books themselves seem unsure what to make of him. In the heavens he breaks order, and in Izumo he brings it. This page keeps both faces in view and shows which record each one comes from.

Born from a nose, or born of two parents

The two eighth-century chronicles do not agree on where he came from. The Kojiki, completed in 712, makes him the last of three children born as Izanagi washes off the pollution of the land of the dead. The Nihon Shoki, completed in 720, mostly has Izanagi and Izanami bring him forth as part of the making of kami, and then adds variants. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that both books count him with the sun kami Amaterasu and the moon kami Tsukuyomi as the "three noble children."

The encyclopedia adds a caution. He is linked with wind and rain, in contrast to the sun and the moon, but it says many elements of his personality remain unclear.

Weeping, an oath and a fine

In the Kojiki he neglects the sea and cries until his beard reaches his stomach. The green mountains wither, and rivers and seas dry up. Asked why, he says he wants to go to his dead mother's land. Izanagi is angry and drives him away.

He climbs to heaven to take leave of his sister. She meets him armed, suspecting an invasion, and the two settle the matter by an oath that produces children from exchanged objects. Declaring that his sincerity has won, he rampages: he breaks the rice-field boundaries, fills the ditches and fouls her palace. Then he drops a flayed horse into her weaving hall, and she shuts herself in the cave. The full scene is on the Amaterasu page.

The assembled kami punish him with a fine of a thousand tables, cut his beard, pull out his nails and expel him again. He begs a meal from the food kami Oho-ge-tsu-hime. Judging her dishes unclean, he kills her. Silkworms and grains grow from her body, and another kami gathers them as seed.

Here the books split. In one variant of the Nihon Shoki the same killing is done by Tsukuyomi, sent down at his sister's request, and the sun kami is so angry that she will not see him face to face. The deed belongs to a different kami depending on the book.

The serpent and the sword

Driven out, he comes down to the upper Hi River in Izumo. Chopsticks drift past, so he walks upstream and finds an old couple weeping beside their daughter. Their other daughters have been devoured, one each year, by an eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent whose body spans eight valleys. Kokugakuin's encyclopedia names it Yamata no Orochi.

He asks for the girl, turns her into a comb in his hair, and has the couple build a fence with eight gates, each holding a vat of strong liquor. The serpent drinks from every vat and falls asleep. He cuts it to pieces and the river runs red. In the middle tail his blade breaks. Inside is a great sword, which the Kojiki calls the Herb-Quelling Great Sword.

The Nihon Shoki gives the sword as Kusanagi and records variants: an older name, Murakumo, with a note that it was renamed in the time of Yamato Takeru; a version that names his serpent-slaying blade separately from the sword found in the tail; and different places where the swords are said to be kept. It also tells of a version in which he first crosses to the land of Silla, sails back in a clay boat and meets the serpent at the headwaters of the Hi. After the victory, the Kojiki has him build a palace at a place he names Suga because his heart feels clear there, and sing a short song about rising clouds.

What the sources are, and what they leave out

The Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720) are the earliest records we could verify for these stories. Both are court compilations, not village memory.

The Encyclopedia of Shinto makes a point that is easy to miss. The gazetteer of Izumo province does not tell the myths of the two chronicles. It names him only as one of the many kami in existence. A surviving excerpt of another gazetteer, Bingo, connects him with a plague kami. We did not read the gazetteers ourselves and did not verify their dates.

Later art draws on the court books. A worked example: in 1832 Keisai Eisen made a small print, a surimono, showing him ready to face the serpent, which the museum's title calls a dragon. The Spencer Museum of Art describes surimono as prints made for private circulation among poetry groups. The print shows the tale was loved in the nineteenth century. It does not date the tale.

Susanoo today

At Susa Shrine in Izumo, the government's database says the main hall stands about twelve meters tall in the grand-shrine style, with a shrine to his sister opposite it. A giant cedar behind the hall is, by historical records, more than 1,300 years old. Local "Seven Wonders" of the shrine, such as a well said to connect to the sea, are regional tradition, not scripture.

The second great current runs through Kyoto. From the medieval period he was often identified with Gozu Tenno, a combined kami-Buddhist figure of plague, whose Indian ancestry the encyclopedia traces to a guardian of a monastery. The Gion rites to appease plague spirits are believed to date to the latter half of the tenth century and later grew into the Gion Festival. When the Meiji government separated kami and Buddhas, the Gion shrine was renamed Yasaka Shrine. Tsushima Shrine in Aichi also honors both.

Common mistakes and mix-ups

• "He is simply the villain." The encyclopedia calls his deeds in heaven disruptive and his Izumo role orderly, and it notes his words there are described as proclamations.
• "He killed the food kami in every version." Only in the Kojiki. A Nihon Shoki variant gives it to Tsukuyomi.
• "The sword has one name and one story." The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki use different names, and the Nihon Shoki variants disagree on where the swords are.
• "He is the same as Gozu Tenno." The two were joined in the medieval period. Their origins are different.
• "The serpent tale is Izumo's own record." By the encyclopedia's account, Izumo's gazetteer does not tell it.