Susanoo

Susanoo is the storm kami of Japanese mythology, born from Izanagi's nose during the same purification ritual that produced his sisters Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi. Assigned to rule the sea, Susanoo instead spent his time weeping for his dead mother Izanami and behaving so destructively, flooding rice paddies and desecrating his sister Amaterasu's sacred hall, that he was ultimately banished from Takamagahara, the heavenly realm. Descending to earth in the land of Izumo, Susanoo encountered an elderly couple weeping because the eight headed, eight tailed serpent Yamata no Orochi was about to devour their last remaining daughter, Kushinada hime. Susanoo agreed to fight the serpent on condition he could marry her, then tricked the monster into drinking eight vats of strong rice wine set out on eight platforms, and slew the drunken serpent while it slept. In the serpent's tail he discovered a great sword, which he presented to Amaterasu, and which later became one of the three sacred imperial regalia of Japan under the name Kusanagi. Even his exile carries its own strange dignity in the myth: rather than remaining a purely destructive figure, Susanoo arrives in Izumo as an outsider who rescues a mortal family and earns his place in a new land through exactly the kind of decisive, protective action that had been entirely absent from his behavior in heaven.

Susanoo's disgrace in myth stands in sharp contrast to the scale of his living cult. He is the chief kami of Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto's Gion district, formerly called Gion Shrine, where he is enshrined alongside his wife Kushinada hime and eight child deities, and the shrine remains one of the most visited in Japan. The Gion tradition of worship historically centered on a distinct deity, Gozu Tenno, a syncretic figure blending Shinto and Buddhist elements, and it was the Meiji era policy separating Buddhism from Shinto that formally reoriented Gion worship around Susanoo as its central kami. Kyoto's Gion Matsuri, one of Japan's largest and most famous annual festivals, traces its origins to this same cult and continues to draw enormous crowds each July. Beyond Kyoto, major shrines dedicated to Susanoo include Hiromine Shrine in Hyogo Prefecture and Tsushima Shrine in Aichi Prefecture, both historically linked to the Gion tradition, along with shrines in the Izumo region of his mythological exile itself. Few kami show as wide a gap between a myth of expulsion and the scale of the worship a community actually built around them. The shrine's connection to Izumo, the very region of Susanoo's mythical exile and his slaying of the serpent, gives his cult an unusually direct link between the geography of the myth and the geography of ongoing worship, a continuity many kami with more heavenly origin stories do not share.