One Name, Two Gods: The Other Watatsumi Born at the Sea's Edge

The existing description already gives Watatsumi's two credited acts as sea king in the Hoori story, summoning every fish to recover the lost fishhook and seating his guest with ceremony before a word is spoken. That figure, the sea king who rules an undersea palace and gives his daughter Toyotama-hime in marriage, is not the only Watatsumi the tradition records. The Nihon Shoki also names three separate Watatsumi deities, Sokotsu-Watatsumi, Nakatsu-Watatsumi and Uwatsu-Watatsumi, born not from a courtship story at all but from Izanagi's own purification in the sea after his return from the land of the dead, in the same rite that produced the three Sumiyoshi gods worshipped as patrons of sailing and of poetry at Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka. Some later shrine traditions read this triad and the single palace-dwelling sea king as the same figure described two ways; others keep them distinct, an unsettled point this record does not resolve either way. What is not in dispute is that the Watatsumi name in the corpus covers both a cosmological triad born at creation's edge and a single personal sea king who hosts a mortal's son, and a reader who has only met the palace and the fishhook has not yet met the whole of what the texts call by that name.