The Kojiki devotes something close to a third of its mythological section to a dynasty that ends by surrendering. Ōkuninushi builds the land, cultivates it, cures its diseases, is murdered twice by his own brothers, escapes an underworld father-in-law, and then hands the whole thing over to the descendants of Amaterasu in exchange for a shrine. The Nihon Shoki gives the same material a fraction of the space.
That gap between the two chronicles is the largest ideological difference between them, and it is the best evidence anywhere in Japanese myth that the compilers were negotiating with a real rival power.
Eighty brothers and a skinned hare
He starts out as Ōnamuchi, the youngest and least regarded of eighty brothers, carrying their bags on a journey to court a woman in Inaba. On the way he finds a hare stripped of its fur, weeping. The brothers, passing first, have told it to bathe in seawater and dry itself in the wind, which has made it far worse.
The hare explains how it got that way: it wanted to cross from an island, so it tricked a line of sea-crocodiles into stretching across the water to be counted, ran along their backs, and boasted about the deception one step too early. The last one caught it and flayed it. Ōnamuchi tells it to wash in fresh water and roll in the pollen of the kama sedge, which works. The hare, which is a deity, tells him that the woman will choose him and not his brothers.
It is the only comic set-piece in the corpus that is also an aetiology of a medicine, and it is why Ōkuninushi is a deity of healing. The hare is enshrined at Hakuto on the Tottori coast, where the rocks it supposedly used are pointed out.
Killed twice
The brothers respond by murdering him. They heat a boulder until it glows, roll it down a mountain and tell him to catch what they are driving towards him; he embraces it and burns to death. His mother appeals to the heavenly kami, who send two shellfish deities — one scrapes, one applies the milky fluid — and he is restored. The remedy reads like a real burn treatment, and the two deities are a cockle and a clam.
They kill him again, wedging him into a split tree, and again he is recovered. His mother then sends him away to Ne-no-katasu-kuni, the root country, where Susanoo rules.
The trials in the root country
There he meets Susanoo's daughter Suseri-bime, and they take one look at each other and marry, which does not please her father. Susanoo sets a sequence of lethal tests:
- A night in a room of snakes, survived by waving a scarf his wife gives him.
- A night in a room of centipedes and wasps, survived by the same means.
- An arrow shot into a wide field, which is then set on fire around him. A mouse tells him the ground is hollow underneath; he drops through, waits out the fire, and the mouse's children bring him the arrow.
Finally, told to pick the lice out of his father-in-law's hair, he finds centipedes instead, and chews red clay and nuts and spits out the pulp so it looks as though he is eating them. Susanoo, satisfied, falls asleep, and Ōnamuchi ties the sleeping god's hair to the rafters, blocks the door with a boulder, takes the sword, the bow and the great koto, and runs with Suseri-bime on his back. The koto brushes a tree and wakes him. Susanoo pursues to the boundary, then stops, and shouts after him to use the weapons on his brothers, rule the land, and make Suseri-bime his chief wife. It is the closest thing to a blessing anywhere in the storm god's career.
Building the land with a thumb-sized partner
Ruling, he is joined by Sukunabikona, a deity so small he arrives across the sea in a pod boat wearing moth skin, and whose father lets him slip between his fingers. Together they establish agriculture, medicine, sake brewing and the control of pests and beasts, and then Sukunabikona simply departs to the eternal land, leaving the work unfinished. The Izumo Fudoki preserves a stock of local landscape legends about the pair, including the famous account of land being hauled in by rope from across the sea to enlarge the Izumo peninsula.
His domain includes the yūkai, the unseen world — the hidden aspect of things, as against the visible affairs that the imperial line administers. That division of labour is stated in the surrender negotiation and is the theological core of what Izumo kept.
Handing over the land
The heavenly kami decide the land should be ruled by Amaterasu's descendants. Two envoys sent to arrange it defect. The third pair, headed by the sword deity Takemikazuchi, plant a blade upright in the surf at Inasa beach and sit cross-legged on its point to put the question.
Ōkuninushi refers them to his sons. Kotoshironushi, found fishing, assents and vanishes under the water. Takeminakata refuses, challenges Takemikazuchi to a trial of strength, has his arm crushed like a reed, flees across the country and surrenders at the lake in Suwa, where he agrees never to leave — which is how the great Suwa shrines got their deity, and why a wrestling match between two gods is treated as the founding precedent for sumo.
Ōkuninushi then names his price: a palace with pillars sunk deep and a ridgepole reaching the sky. That is Izumo Taisha.
The shrine that really was that tall
Medieval documents claimed the hall once stood forty-eight metres high, reached by a ramp over a hundred metres long, and this was treated for a long time as an obvious exaggeration. In 2000, excavation at the shrine uncovered the remains of enormous pillars — bundles of three great cedar trunks bound together as single columns, of a scale consistent with the claim. It is the most striking case in Japanese archaeology of a mythological building specification turning out to be structurally serious.
Izumo also keeps two ritual peculiarities. Worshippers clap four times rather than the usual two. And in the tenth lunar month, when the rest of Japan calls it the godless month, Izumo calls it the month with gods, because the kami of the country are believed to assemble there — to discuss, among other things, who should marry whom. Ōkuninushi is consequently the pre-eminent deity of enmusubi, the tying of relationships, and the shrine is full of people praying about their love lives beneath a colossal straw rope.
Why does he have so many names?
The Kojiki lists five and explains none of them: Ōnamuchi, Ashihara-shikoo, Yachihoko, Utsushikunitama and Ōkuninushi itself. They are best understood as separate local deities merged into one figure — different regions' land-masters consolidated under a single name during the compilation of a national mythology, with the alternative titles preserved rather than deleted. Names accumulate in this tradition the way shrines do, and the Japanese family tree marks how many generations each chronicle puts between him and the storm god.
Was the surrender of the land a real historical event?
Not as narrated, but it is not fiction either. Izumo in the late Yayoi and Kofun periods was a genuinely distinct centre with its own metalwork tradition and burial practice — the 1984 discovery of 358 bronze swords in a single pit at Kōjindani, more than had previously been found in the whole country, made that impossible to dismiss. A powerful western region absorbed into the Yamato state, and compensated with unmatched ritual privilege, fits both the archaeology and the text. What the chronicles record is the settlement's terms, dressed as a conversation on a beach, and the tradition overview sets out why an official history needed to include it at all.