Ninigi

Sarutahiko (Sarutahiko Okami) is an earthly kami (kunitsukami) of Japanese myth, remembered above all as the deity who guided the descent of the heavenly grandchild. When Ninigi, grandson of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, came down from Heaven to rule the land, the mythic charter of the imperial line, it was Sarutahiko, a towering, long-nosed, ruddy figure of imposing appearance, who stood at the crossroads of Heaven and earth and led the way.

For this he is honoured as a god of guidance, of roads and crossings and of new beginnings, and is invoked for safe travel and for the auspicious opening of undertakings. In the myth he afterwards marries the kami Ame-no-Uzume, the goddess whose dance had earlier helped draw Amaterasu from her cave. His striking appearance links him in the popular imagination to the long-nosed tengu and to the masked figures who lead festival processions, and he is enshrined at Tsubaki Grand Shrine and elsewhere as a guardian of the way.

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki attach a second, harsher episode to Konohanasakuya-hime's marriage, one that explains why the imperial line, and human beings generally, do not live forever. Before Ninigi chose her, her father Oyamatsumi offered him both of his daughters together: Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom princess, and her elder sister Iwanaga-hime, the rock princess, whose name means long-enduring as stone. Ninigi, taken with the younger sister's beauty and repelled by the elder's plain appearance, sent Iwanaga-hime back to her father and kept only the blossom princess for his wife.

Oyamatsumi's response, in the telling preserved in the Nihon Shoki, was grief rather than anger at the insult: he explained that he had sent the two sisters together for a reason, so that Ninigi's descendants would have lived as long and unchanging as rock through Iwanaga-hime, while flourishing and prospering like the blossoming trees through Konohanasakuya-hime; by rejecting the rock sister, Ninigi had condemned his own line, and by extension humankind, to lives that bloom brilliantly and fall quickly, like the cherry blossom, rather than enduring like stone. The myth gives Konohanasakuya-hime's association with beautiful transience a second, more consequential meaning: her chosen beauty is also the origin, in this telling, of human mortality itself.