Kuninotokotachi

Kuninotokotachi is one of the first and most primordial of the Shinto kami, an eternal deity who, in the account of the Nihon Shoki, emerges alone at the founding of the earth and stands as a hidden, abiding foundation beneath the world. In the earliest myths he is, like the other first kami, an abstract and self-effacing figure: he appears at the very beginning, among the deities who arise before the generative pair Izanagi and Izanami, and he is described as a solitary god who conceals himself, without narrative or descendants of his own. He belongs to the primordial ground of things rather than to the storied world of the later gods. Like several such first deities, however, Kuninotokotachi took on far greater importance in later theology than his slight role in the myths would suggest.

In the medieval and early-modern periods he was elevated by influential schools of Shinto thought, notably the Yoshida (or Yuiitsu) Shinto tradition, to the rank of a supreme, eternal, foundational deity, sometimes treated as the ultimate origin and cosmic principle underlying all existence, an unchanging ground of the universe. This later exaltation is a clear instance of a recurring pattern in the history of Shinto: the abstract, nearly silent first kami of the ancient chronicles are taken up by later thinkers seeking a single supreme principle, and are raised to the summit of the pantheon as the eternal source from which the world proceeds. Kuninotokotachi stands as the divine name for the enduring, hidden foundation on which the land itself rests.

Kuninotokotachi's most dramatic modern role came not from mainstream Shinto but from a new religious movement founded at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1892 a Japanese peasant woman named Deguchi Nao began experiencing possession by a deity who identified itself as Ushitora no Konjin, and the automatic writings she produced, later compiled as the Ofudesaki, became the founding scripture of the new religion Omoto.

Within Omoto's theology, this once-feared, ill-omened spirit of popular divination was reinterpreted and identified with Kuninotokotachi no Mikoto, recast as the true, original ruling god of the world who had been driven out in the ancient past by lesser deities and was now returning to purify and restore a corrupted world before a coming age of renewal. This reworking took the nearly silent primordial kami of the Nihon Shoki, previously significant chiefly to specialist theologians such as the Yoshida school, and turned him into an active, apocalyptic figure at the center of a living religious movement with real historical consequences: Omoto grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, drew the suspicion of the Japanese state for its unorthodox and at times millenarian teachings, and was twice suppressed by government authorities, in 1921 and again in 1935, precisely because a theology built around Kuninotokotachi's promised return to rightful rule was heard by the authorities as a challenge to the emperor's own claimed divine authority. The episode shows how a figure who is little more than a name in the oldest chronicles could, centuries later, become the doctrinal center of a movement taken seriously enough to be twice forcibly dismantled by the state.