Uke Mochi

The existing description tells the Nihon Shoki's version of Uke Mochi's death: sent for by Amaterasu, she offers Tsukuyomi a feast drawn from her own body, and he kills her for the insult of being served food that came from inside her. The Kojiki, compiled eight years earlier than the Nihon Shoki, records what reads as the same underlying episode with two details changed. There the goddess is named Ogetsu-hime rather than Uke Mochi, and her killer is not the moon god Tsukuyomi but Susanoo, freshly banished from heaven and demanding food from her on his way down to earth. She produces it from her nose, her mouth and her rectum, and Susanoo, believing himself served something unclean, kills her on the spot rather than in disgust at its origin. What her corpse then yields, silkworms from her head, rice from her eyes, millet from her ears, beans from her nose and wheat from her private parts in the Kojiki's own accounting, differs in the particulars from the Nihon Shoki's list but repeats its structure exactly: a slain goddess whose body becomes the world's first crops. Two of Japan's oldest chronicles, compiled within a decade of each other from what was likely a shared older oral tradition, preserve the same death-into-harvest story under two different names and two different killers, which is itself a fact about how the myth was transmitted rather than a contradiction to be resolved in favor of one telling.

The atlas records Uke Mochi's veneration status as actively venerated in a living tradition, and the concrete form that standing takes today centers on Ise Jingu, the most important shrine complex in Shinto, specifically its Outer Shrine, the Geku, dedicated to Toyouke Omikami. Toyouke is widely identified with Uke Mochi and with her Kojiki counterpart Ogetsu-hime as the same food deity under different names across different texts and shrine traditions, called to Ise from Tanba province by imperial request specifically so that Amaterasu, enshrined at the Inner Shrine nearby, would have a deity to provide her meals. That founding purpose is not a dormant legend. The Geku's priests have performed Higoto Asagu Omike Sai, the twice daily food offering rite, morning and evening without interruption for roughly one thousand five hundred years, preparing rice, fish, seaweed, vegetables, fruit, salt and sake with fire kindled by the shrine's own traditional method and water drawn from its own well, and presenting the meal to Toyouke first and, through her, to Amaterasu. The rite is a real, dated, currently performed act of worship rather than a historical description, carried out on the same schedule today that it was centuries before living memory, and it is the clearest concrete instance available of Uke Mochi's own veneration continuing into the present rather than surviving only as a written myth.