3. Hachiman, Before He Was a War God

If you have visited more than a few shrines in Japan, you have already met Hachiman — there are more shrines to him than to any other deity, from the great Tsurugaoka Hachimangū of the samurai capital Kamakura on down. The guidebooks introduce him in three words: god of war.

The Tale of Kunisaki covered that brilliant career — the oracles that moved the court (tale 3), the patronage of the first shoguns (tale 9). Today we dig in the other direction. Before anyone recruited him as a war god, what was Hachiman?

Fair warning: this is the deepest rabbit hole on the peninsula. Even the specialists have not hit the bottom.

Oddity one: he is missing from Japan’s own mythology

Japan’s official eighth-century chronicles — the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, the closest thing the country has to a Genesis — give starring roles to the sun goddess Amaterasu and the storm-god clans of Izumo. Hachiman, the future guardian deity of the nation, barely appears at all.

A local god, so no surprise — except that this uncredited provincial deity would end up trusted by the very court that wrote the chronicles. A god who worked his way up from outside the official mythology to the top of the state: that career arc, so unusual for a god anywhere, is the first clue that something interesting is going on.

Oddity two: even the name is a riddle

“Hachiman” is written with two characters meaning “eight banners” — and in early times it was probably read the Japanese way, Yahata. The god himself explains, in an oracle preserved at Usa:

At the fortress of Karakuni I first descended from heaven as eight streaming banners, and I became a god of Japan. [1]

Eight banners falling from the sky — hence the name. But look at the address: Karakuni means, roughly, the Korean lands. In the very first line of his own introduction, this “god of Japan” points across the sea. The name, the reading, the geography — the riddles start at the front door.

Oddity three: no visible form, yet the biggest personality in the room

Hachiman is, formally, a voice: a god who speaks through the oracles of shrine priestesses (tale 2). And yet the episodes preserved in the Compendium of Oracles — the 1313 collection we met last time — add up to one of the most vivid characters in Japanese religion. If the Japanese pantheon has a trickster hiding in its upper ranks, he may be it.

He shape-shifts constantly. To the ascetic Ōga no Higi, after three years of prayers, he appeared as a three-year-old boy standing on a bamboo leaf, announcing himself as the spirit of an ancient emperor. Around that encounter he also turned up as a golden hawk, a golden dove, and — most striking of all — a blacksmith with seven faces. [2]

He wanders. The Compendium traces his itinerary before settling at Usa: from Karakuni through the provinces of Yamato, Kii, Kibi, Suō… across to Iyo on the island of Shikoku, and finally to a great rock in the sea off Nada beach — on the Kunisaki Peninsula itself. A vagabond god whose long road home ends on our peninsula’s shore; in one oracle he reminisces, “long ago, when I traveled back and forth from Iyo…” [3]

He steals. The Compendium’s best story, hands down. The holy man Hōren possessed a wish-fulfilling jewel, earned through years of mountain austerities. An old man who had long served him asked for it, was refused — and ran off with it. Hōren chased the thief to a mountaintop, where the old man transformed into a golden hawk and revealed himself: I am Hachiman. Then came the settlement: when I take my seat at Usa, I will found the temple Miroku-ji, and you, Hōren, will be its first abbot. A god who steals a treasure, gets caught, and negotiates — and whose settlement terms become the founding charter of the fusion of gods and buddhas. [4]

He demands attention. “I am the god who has been living in seclusion outside the west fence of your shrine,” he announced to a diviner. “Enshrine me, or I will fill your house with my presence.” (The diviner forgot; the story has him drop dead.) A god this frank about wanting to be worshipped is almost refreshing. [5]

He goes to war in person. During a southern rebellion he declared, “I myself shall go and subdue them,” and rode to the front in a litter — which tradition counts as the origin of the omikoshi, the portable shrines you see carried at every Japanese festival today. [6]

He travels to meet the Buddha. In 749, having backed the casting of the Great Buddha of Nara, he announced he wished to meet it — and journeyed to the capital in a purple litter, a god paying a state visit to a statue. [7]

When asked, he answers straight. In 769, a scheming monk named Dōkyō stood one oracle away from taking the throne itself. Sent to Usa to verify, the envoy Wake no Kiyomaro received Hachiman’s reply: the throne belongs to the imperial line — no. History calls it divine intervention in the succession. From the god’s side of the fence, you could say he was simply asked a question and answered it honestly — the same unfiltered frankness as the fellow demanding a shrine outside the fence. [8]

And in the end, he worries — and takes vows. “To be a god is suffering,” he declared, and asked for the Buddhist path — the extraordinary episode of the god who became a monk, which we met in tale 6. [9]

No visible form, and yet all this personality. As we said last time: what these stories record is less what Hachiman did than how people wanted to talk about him. Behind a character this vivid stands a crowd of vivid storytellers.

So what was he, originally?

Peer into the scholarship and you find several theories standing side by side:

• The emperor theory — officially, Hachiman is the spirit of the ancient emperor Ōjin. But most scholars see that identification as a later arrangement, not the starting point
• The immigrant-god theory — “descended at the fortress of Karakuni,” says the god himself. One of Usa’s hereditary priestly clans, the Karashima, seems to carry the connection to the continent in its very name
• The sea-god theory — a deity of the Inland Sea sailors, matching the maritime world of tale 2
• The smith-god theory — remember the blacksmith with seven faces? Nearby Mt. Kawara was a major source of copper in antiquity, and Hachiman’s great national moment was helping cast a giant bronze Buddha. A metal-working god would fit suspiciously well

The honest summary: no single theory wins, and each seems to hold one true piece of him.

A god born mixed

There is a fact that makes sense of that scattered picture. The priesthood at Usa was shared, from early times, among three clans: the Usa clan, local worshippers of the sacred Mt. Omoto; the Karashima clan, with their continental connections; and the Ōga clan, said to have come from the Yamato heartland — Higi, who met the boy on the bamboo leaf, was one of them.

Local mountain worship, an immigrant god from over the sea, and the rites of the central court: three streams meeting at Usa and slowly braided, over generations, into a single deity. On this view Hachiman did not begin as any one thing. He was born mixed.

And suddenly everything clicks. He is missing from the official mythology because he was a joint production that fit no single clan’s canon. His personality is outsized because he had so many narrators. And — the thought that sets up our next dig — a god who was born a blend had no fear of blending once more, when Buddhism came across the sea.

Today’s haul from the rabbit hole

• Hachiman is (nearly) absent from Japan’s official myths — an outsider god who rose to guardian of the state
• His name means “eight banners,” and his own oracle points across the sea for his origin
• Shape-shifter, wanderer, jewel thief, straight-talker, war-goer, Buddha-visitor, and finally a god who took vows: no form, maximum character
• The theories — emperor, immigrant, sea, smith — each hold a piece. Best key: three priestly clans, three streams, one god born mixed

A born blend of a god, and a foreign religion arriving by ship. What happened when those two met at Usa — and why did it take a special word to describe it? Next time, we finally dig into shinbutsu-shūgō.

Worth a Visit: The Beach Where the God Came Ashore — Hachiman Nada-gū

Here is the rare rabbit hole with a street address. The last stop on that long wandering itinerary — Nada beach, on the east coast of the Kunisaki Peninsula — is a ten-minute drive from Oita Airport. Midway along the shallow sweep of sand stands Hachiman Nada-gū, in the city of Kitsuki.

Look out to sea from the grounds and you will find a torii standing on a rock about 300 metres offshore. You have seen this image on a postcard — the great gate in the water at Miyajima. This is the same idea without the crowds, and with a stronger claim: that rock, called Ichikishima, is the shrine’s original shrine, the spot where the deity is said to have first come down. It is the “great rock in the sea off Nada beach” from the Compendium’s itinerary. And the halls are built facing it — the belief that this god arrived from somewhere across the water is not written on a signboard here. It is the direction the building points.

Nada-gū is a branch shrine of Usa, founded, by tradition, in 729 by the high priest of Usa himself. But the tie to Usa shows best in a ceremony that has not been performed in centuries: the Gyōkōe.

Hachiman’s sacred body — the object that was the god, in the way a statue is elsewhere — was a pillow woven from wild reed. A formless god, embodied in marsh grass. Once every six years, reed was cut from the sacred pond at Komo Shrine, inland at what is now Nakatsu, and woven into a new pillow, carried by palanquin around the shrines of the god’s story, and installed in the upper hall at Usa. The old pillow moved down to the lower hall — and the pillow from the lower hall was carried across the peninsula to Nada. There it was not stored. It was set adrift from the great rock off this beach (another account has it delivered to a Hachiman shrine on the coast of Iyo, across the water, and released into the sea there).

Read that against the itinerary above. Karakuni, Yamato, Kii, Kibi, Suō, Iyo — and then the rock off Nada. The retiring sacred body travels that road backwards. The god came out of the sea onto this beach; the god’s worn-out body goes back into the sea from the same beach. Whoever designed that had a sense of narrative symmetry the rest of us can only envy.

The Gyōkōe was ruinously expensive, and after the thirteenth century it lapsed for long stretches; the warlord Hosokawa Tadaoki staged it once in 1615, after a gap of some 150 years, and then it faded again. It is not performed today, though there are people who would like it back.

One more thing not to miss. Nada-gū holds three wooden seated figures — a Hachiman and two goddesses — designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan, and said to be the former sacred body of Usa itself, moved here. Note what form the Hachiman takes: a shaven-headed monk. The oldest surviving portrait of this formless god shows him as a Buddhist cleric. The god who said “to be a god is suffering” and asked for the Buddhist path (tale 6) — that wish, carved in wood, sits on this beach.

Practicalities: Kitsuki, Oita Prefecture; about 10 minutes by car from Oita Airport, 15 from the Kitsuki interchange. The annual festival falls on 5 April, and the shrine preserves a rice-planting rite recognised as an intangible folk cultural property by the prefecture. To see the three figures, arrange it in advance — the enquiry form of the Kitsuki City Tourism Association is the easiest route, and its fields are labelled in English.

It is also a well-known spot for sunrise. Watch the light come up out of the sea, and spare a thought for the people who stood here and said: eight banners washed ashore at this place.

Notes on sources

The episodes above come from the Compendium of Oracles of Hachiman of Usa (1313, compiled by Jin’un). Volume identifications follow the chronological index of the Compendium prepared at Yamaguchi University (2014).

• [1] Hachiman’s self-introduction (the eight banners at Karakuni); his wanderings appear in vol. 3
• [2] Vol. 5 — the golden hawk, the dove, the seven-faced blacksmith, and the child on the bamboo leaf (the revelations to Ōga no Higi)
• [3] Vol. 3 — the itinerary from Karakuni via Iyo to the rock off Nada beach, Kunisaki
• [4] Vol. 5 — the origin of the wish-fulfilling jewel; Hōren and the old man of Mt. Hachimen
• [5] Vol. 13 — the god in seclusion outside the fence of the Hishigata shrine
• [6] Vol. 5 — the Hayato campaign and the litter borne to the front
• [7] Vol. 6 — the Great Buddha and the journey to the capital
• [8] Vol. 8 — the Dōkyō affair and Wake no Kiyomaro’s report
• [9] The god’s wish to leave godhood appears in the founding legend of Miroku-ji (844); the Compendium also preserves traditions of his taking vows on Mt. Omoto (vol. 14 and elsewhere)

For “Worth a Visit,” the Gyōkōe, the reed pillow, and the three figures follow the traditions recorded at Nada-gū and Usa Jingū (local shrine histories and the signboards of the Gyōkōe shrines) together with the national cultural property listings.