Prologue — The Navel of Kyūshū, the Road to the Hidden Shrine

You cannot arrive here simply by driving down Route 218.

In eastern Kumamoto Prefecture lies Yamato Town, deep in the mountains. With the outer rim of Mount Aso at its back, the road stretches toward the border with Miyazaki, and locals know it as the “Mythic Road.” It is the mountain road that leads on to Takachiho. The greenery is deep, the sky feels close. And yet most people pass straight by, never noticing that a single shrine lies hidden along the way.

There is a place where the road bends gently. A small guidepost stands there: Heitate Jingū. Unless you are watching for it, you will miss it. In truth, many who set out to visit this shrine have written that they drove past it at least once. No tour buses line up here; no great signboard announces it. This is, in every sense, a “hidden shrine.”

Heitate Jingū does not belong to Jinja Honcho, the Association of Shinto Shrines. While most shrines across Japan fall under that organization, this one remains apart, quietly enduring in a place outside it. Few shrines suit the phrase “known only to those who know” so well. And those who do know tend to say the same thing: it is said that only those who are meant to come can find their way here.

It may sound like superstition. But read through the records of those who have actually made their way to the shrine, and you meet the same strange coincidence again and again. They try to go, and lose their way. Plans fall through. And then, through a strange chain of coincidences, as though invited, they find themselves standing before the shrine after all. Accounts like these have been left behind many times over.

Why should a shrine holding so deep a story stand here, in the depths of these mountains?

In its own tradition, Heitate Jingū is said to carry “fifteen thousand years of history.” Its origins are said to reach back before the enthronement of Emperor Jinmu, before even the descent of the heavenly grandson — all the way to the age of the gods, when heaven and earth had only just parted. Within its grounds rises a sacred tree said to hold not an age measured by tree rings, but a “life current” of fifteen thousand years. And in the main hall rests a treasure opened only once every five years: a set of sacred masks painted in five colors — red, white, yellow, black, and blue — said to represent the ancestral deities of humankind.

This is the land said to be the “homeland” where all the peoples of the world first emerged as one, before dividing into five colors and spreading across the earth.

The shrine stands near the very center of Kyūshū, at a point that seems to form the island’s “navel.” When you stand at this single spot — what we might call the navel of the earth — you step quietly into the most ancient stratum of Japanese myth. And this journey does not end with the shrine above ground. From behind the main hall, you descend through the forest to a pond where a dragon deity sleeps. And beyond that, deeper still, to a place where myth and legend reach down into the interior of the earth itself.

This is the record of a journey descending into the depths of myth.

Let us begin by standing at its entrance.

Chapter 1 — The One Who Raised the Hei: The Legend of the White Bird

Every shrine, no matter how ancient or mysterious, has its official story. This is the shaden — the shrine’s own transmitted account of its origins. In the case of Heitate Jingū, that surface story begins with a single deity and a single white bird.

The time is a little after the age of the gods. There was a deity named Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto, a grandson of Emperor Jimmu. Commanded by the first emperor to “pacify the western seas,” he journeyed down to Kyūshū — what was then called the “Land of Fire.” He is the deity said to have opened up the land of Aso and later become its guardian: a deity of special meaning to Kyūshū.

The shrine’s own chief priest tells of his journey this way. From the land of Hyūga — present-day Miyazaki — the deity followed the Gokase River into Mitai (Takachiho), passed through Mamihara, and made his way toward the land of Kusakabe. It was a long journey, threading through the folds of the mountains.

It was along this journey that a single white bird appeared and guided the deity to this land of Heitate. Following its guidance, the deity paused, and was struck by the beauty of the view spread out before him. Near the very center of Kyūshū, a high place with a clear, open prospect. This is no mere place of passage, he must have felt. There he raised the sacred hei — the heihaku — and enshrined the heavenly and earthly kami, known collectively as Tenjin Chigi.

Heihaku refers to offerings presented to the kami, especially sacred cloth, paper streamers, or the ritual wands known as nusa or gohei. Because this was the place where it was “raised” — tate — the name became Heitate. The shrine’s name was born from the very act of this one deity.

What is intriguing is that the chief priest who relates this legend of the white bird does not see it as a mere chance guiding of the way. The deity already knew, from the very beginning, that this land was Takamagahara, the Hi-no-Miya — literally the Shrine of the Sun. That was why, the priest says, he poured his passion into opening Aso: to safeguard this capital of the gods. Behind the surface tradition, a deeper historical truth lies concealed. That is what the chief priest himself maintains.

This is the outermost story Heitate Jingū tells about itself.

Trace the historical records, and the outline of the shrine grows a little clearer. In the Engi era (901–923), Tomonari, chief priest of Aso, built the shrine hall and enshrined the Inner and Outer Shrines of Ise — Amaterasu-Ōmikami and Toyouke-no-Ōmikami — naming it Heitate-sha. Later, in the first year of the Tenyō era (1144), the chief priest Tomotaka enshrined alongside them the twelve deities of Aso, making it the chief guardian shrine of the whole Ōno district. The present shrine hall was renovated in the fourteenth year of the Kyōhō era (1729) under Hosokawa Nobunori of the Higo Hosokawa family. In the sixth year of the Meiji era (1873), it was ranked as a gōsha, a district-level shrine under the modern shrine ranking system.

Set out in this way, it becomes clear that Heitate Jingū has walked its path as a venerable local guardian shrine: tied to Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto, the deity who opened Aso, and enshrining both the gods of Ise and the gods of Aso. A shrine to deities who shaped the land and brought agriculture. That is the firm, documented form of Heitate Jingū.

— And yet, here, let us pause for a moment.

What has just been told is, after all, the “surface story of the shrine.” The shaden that Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto raised the hei. The record that Ise was enshrined in the Engi era. These are no more than the layer of history that has risen to the surface.

For Heitate Jingū hands down, separately, a story of an age far older than this Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto — older than Tenson Kōrin, the descent of the heavenly grandson, older than Emperor Jimmu, reaching back thousands of years further still. Recall the chief priest’s words from a moment ago: that when the deity raised the hei, this land was already Takamagahara, the Hi-no-Miya. Long before any hei was raised here, the story goes, this was already sacred ground.

In that “long before,” what was there?

Many who visit Heitate Jingū are drawn toward something the surface tradition cannot explain — a span of fifteen thousand years, the five-colored masks of the ancestral deities of humankind, the air of a hidden shrine that appears in no guidebook. Beneath the surface story, another, far deeper story lies sleeping.

Its entrance is in a single sacred tree that rises within the grounds. In the next chapter, we step into the way that tree has counted time — a “life current of fifteen thousand years,” a manner of measuring time utterly unlike our common sense.

Chapter 2: The Fifteen-Thousand-Year Sacred Tree — The Time-Concept of the Lifeline

Whenever Hifuri Jingū is spoken of, one number is always brought forward: fifteen thousand years.

Most people are bewildered by this staggering figure at first. Fifteen thousand years ago, Japan was still in the transition from the Paleolithic to the Jōmon era — a remote antiquity, when the Ice Age was only just drawing to its close.

But widen the field of view to the whole world, and this number suddenly takes on an uneasy significance. Scattered across the earth are megalithic structures that seem beyond the work of human hands. The pyramids of Egypt, megalithic remains in many regions — many of them have been spoken of as the products of a super-ancient civilization far older than the accepted accounts allow. And were those great inheritances really born separately, independently, each in its own land? Why is it that across the world, at almost the same period, almost the same traces of wisdom were left behind?

Here there is one bold view. Long ago, the earth may have held a “mother super-ancient civilization” surpassing our own, and from it a single power may have granted the same wisdom, the same civilization, to lands all over the world. Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria — those phantom continents said to have sunk beneath the sea. The memory of them is carved, in altered forms, into myths and ruins the world over. If that were so, then the power that raised the pyramids and the power that brought the gods down upon this sacred site of Hifuri were not separate things. They would have issued from one and the same source — the same power.

There is no firm proof. But recall this: Hifuri Jingū is, from its very origin, a shrine that tells how “the human race of the world was born from a single place, divided into five colors, and scattered across the earth.” The source was one — and is that not the very message this shrine has handed down across fifteen thousand years? The view that the source of the world’s civilizations was a single one resonates, at a startlingly deep level, with the legend of the goshikijin (the people of five colors). The true nature of that resonance will gradually take shape as you read on through this story. For now it is enough to feel this: the fifteen thousand years that this single sacred tree marks belong to the same ancient light, the same far-off age, as the great ruins of the world.

But the chief priest of Hifuri Jingū speaks of the meaning of this number quite plainly. Fifteen thousand years does not mean that the shrine’s buildings were raised fifteen thousand years ago. It means that the lifeline — the meimyaku — of the sacred tree is fifteen thousand years.

Meimyaku. It may be an unfamiliar word. The pulse of life — that is, the continuity of life. This single term is the whole theme of this chapter.

Within the precincts of Hifuri Jingū rises a single hinoki (Japanese cypress). It is the sacred tree called the Tenjinboku, the “tree of the heavenly gods.” It stands within the dense, shadowed grove, wrapped in an air more divine than any tree around it. But what makes this tree special is not merely that it is large, not merely that it is old. From the same stock, the story goes, a hinoki grows and then decays, and from the decayed root yet another new hinoki sprouts — and it has repeated this changing of generations, on and on, without end.

Here I would like to touch a little on the hinoki itself. For the Japanese, the hinoki is a special tree. It grows straight, aiming for the heavens; its timber is fragrant, slow to rot, and supports buildings for over a thousand years. It is said that Hōryū-ji still stands because of the astonishing durability of hinoki wood. Since ancient times, the hinoki has been the most prized of all timbers for shrines and palaces. Its name is said to derive from hi no ki, the “tree of fire,” for rubbed together it gives birth to flame, and so it has been held a sacred tree. As a vessel for enshrining the gods, no tree is more fitting. That a single hinoki was chosen as the yorishiro — the vessel into which the gods descend — carries, in itself, a deep inevitability.

Imagine it for a moment.

A tree grows over long years, at last reaches the end of its span, and withers. Ordinarily, the story of that one tree ends there. It falls, decays, returns to the soil, and that is all. Yet from the root of that decayed stock, the same hinoki puts out a shoot again. New life rises up, nourished by the corpse of the old. It grows for hundreds of years, becomes a giant tree, and at last decays again. Then, from its root, the next hinoki — and on it goes. The tree, changing its generations, has carried a single life on, at one and the same point.

The hinoki now standing in the precincts is said to be the “tenth generation.” Its estimated age is about two thousand years.

Here, pause and think. The tenth generation, two thousand years. Then if you trace back — the ninth generation, the eighth, all the way to the first — how long does that chain of life become? The shrine counts it as fifteen thousand years. This is the meaning of the “lifeline of fifteen thousand years.” It is neither the age of a building nor the years of a single tree. It is the total span across which the life that is the hinoki has been handed down, across generations, in the same place. That is the fifteen thousand years.

In this instant, the sense of time we had taken for granted begins, quietly, to be shaken.

We usually count a tree’s age by its “ring-age” — the number of years from when a single tree sprouted until today. That is the natural way of counting. Look at the stump of a fallen tree and the rings are carved there; count them one by one, and you know how many years the tree lived. One tree, one lifespan’s worth. It is an utterly clear and unquestionable way to count.

Yet the sacred tree of Hifuri Jingū quietly refuses that clear method of counting. What is counted here is not the years a single tree lived. It is the “continuity of life itself,” handed down from generation to generation, from stock to stock. For a single tree to wither is not an end, but merely a handing-on to the next generation. Death does not sever the continuity; it is a part of it. How great a reversal of thought this is. We grasp the “lifespan of a thing” as a single line with a beginning and an end. But the thought of the lifeline grasps it as an endless circle, in which the end folds back into the next beginning.

This may closely resemble the feeling we have when we count a “family line.”

The lifespan of one human being is barely a hundred years. But if blood is joined from parent to child, from child to grandchild, the history of that “house” stretches to hundreds, even thousands of years. You, as a single human being, live only a few decades. Yet your “life” has been handed down without break from your parents, from your grandparents, from ancestors before them. From some nameless someone tens of thousands of years ago, all the way to you, a single thread has run on, never once severed. Had that thread been cut at even one point, the you of now would not exist. The fifteen thousand years of the sacred tree is exactly this idea. Not the ring-age of a single tree, but the length of the “family line” that the life called hinoki has spun in the same place. It is the story of the tree’s life, of its bloodline.

The shrine holds a further, more daring tradition. At the root of the present tenth-generation tree, traces left by trees of past generations can be seen, in the form of swellings like burls. These are called kagami-kobu (mirror-burls). And one of those mirror-burls is said to be from the age of Emperor Sujin, when the tenth generation sprouted; another, from the age of the ninth generation — the age, no less, of Amaterasu-Ōmikami. The names of the gods who appear in myth, and the generations of the tree, are joined seamlessly upon a single trunk. Amaterasu-Ōmikami is the supreme deity of Japanese myth. In the age when that god was in this world, the ninth-generation tree stood — so the shrine says. Here, myth and tree are not separate things. They exist side by side upon the same single axis of time. Lay your hand on the trunk of the tree, and the age of myth sleeps there, turned to growth rings — this is the imagining the tradition permits us.

What I would like to recall here is that fifteen thousand years coincides exactly with the dawn of the Jōmon era. The Jōmon people, for more than ten thousand years, changed the patterns of their pottery and the forms of their lives only gently. Their time did not “progress” in a straight line as ours does. Seasons turned, generations turned, the same labors were repeated — they lived within a circling time. The tree decays and revives, decays again and revives again. Is not that way of counting the lifeline the very sense of circling time of the Jōmon? We of the present, who seek results within a year, are asked for outcomes within a quarter, and are chased by time down to the second — perhaps the reason we lose our words before this sacred tree is that we suddenly touch the “other time” we have forgotten.

Of course, none of this can be proven as literal scientific fact. Whether the first-generation hinoki truly sprouted fifteen thousand years ago, whether the changing of generations truly happened ten times — there is, at present, no means to confirm it. However many rings you count, you will get only the two thousand years of the present tree. So it is easy to dismiss this as an “absurd fabrication.”

But what matters here is not the question of whether it is fact alone. I would rather turn my eyes to the sensibility behind it: why did this shrine deliberately choose the unfamiliar way of counting called the “lifeline” rather than the “ring-age”?

Do not let the death of a single tree be the end. Even when it decays, let the life be carried on, in the same place. In that continuity, see the sacred. This feeling is, in truth, by no means peculiar to the Japanese. Ise Jingū, for instance, rebuilds its halls entirely once every twenty years. This is the labor called shikinen sengū, kept up for more than thirteen hundred years. The old halls are dismantled, and entirely new halls are built on the adjacent ground. The buildings themselves become brand new every twenty years. But what is handed down there is not the “thing” that is the building. The technique of building the halls, the form of the rites, and the god itself — a formless essence — is transferred into a new vessel and preserved forever. Old things decay. But, with decay folded in from the start, they nonetheless go on.

Look across the world, and the faith that reveres great trees as sacred is by no means rare. In Norse myth there is Yggdrasil, the colossal ash tree that stands piercing the world, its branches and leaves covering the heavens and its roots reaching into the underworld. In India, the Buddha attained enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree. In many lands, people have seen the gods in great trees, and the center of the cosmos. But where most of these imagined “a single immortal tree,” the sacred tree of Hifuri Jingū is a “tree that decays and revives.” Not immortality, but rebirth. Not standing forever, but rising again and again, passing through death. Here lies the originality of the Japanese conception.

The sacred tree of Hifuri Jingū stands upon precisely this thought. The single tree that is the hinoki decays. But the life does not decay. It is transferred to the next generation, and the next, and preserved forever in the same place. Life that goes on, passing through the death of all formed things. The distinctive grasp of “eternity” that the Japanese have long held is, in this single hinoki, condensed whole. If the eternity of the West was entrusted to undecaying stone temples and the unchanging figure of a single god, the eternity of Japan was entrusted to what accepts decay and goes on while shifting. The sacred tree is the living witness to that thought.

And there is something that must not be forgotten. This sacred tree is not merely an old tree. According to the shrine’s tradition, it was upon the crown of this very tree that the gods descended from heaven. Gods riding on balls of fire tore through the night sky, came drifting down, and came to rest on the crown of this hinoki — so it is told. Imagine it. In a remote antiquity without writing or states, into a mountain hollow sunk in darkness, a sphere of fire suddenly descends from the heavens. Tearing through the pitch-black night sky, a dazzling mass of light comes slowly drifting down upon this mountaintop. The ancient people, clad in furs, look up at it. They may have prostrated themselves. Or they may have only gazed at the light, without a sound. That sphere of fire comes quietly to rest on the crown of a single hinoki, and there, at last, the gods reveal their forms. The awe and astonishment of the ancient people who witnessed it — the very first fragment of that memory — may still breathe quietly at the root of the staggering number, fifteen thousand years. This tree, then, is the yorishiro joining heaven and earth, the point of contact where the gods first touched this earth. The lifeline of fifteen thousand years is not merely a tale of a tree that lived long. It is a word pointing to the very miracle itself: that the single sacred point where the gods descended has been guarded and preserved, never once broken, across fifteen thousand years.

Then who, exactly, were those “descended gods”? The gods who rode upon balls of fire and chose this single hinoki, rising at the navel of Kyūshū, to descend upon —

Gazing up at the tree of the fifteen-thousand-year lifeline, our question draws nearer at last to the heart of this shrine. Stand before this tree in person, and many are said to be wrapped in a strange sensation. Look up, and the crown dissolves into the heavens far overhead; touch the trunk, and from deep within the cool bark something pulsing seems to come through. Whether it is the weight of fifteen thousand years of time, or the presence of the gods said once to have descended here — reason cannot tell. Only this: before this tree, everyone naturally grows quiet, halts their steps, and looks up for a while. In the next chapter, let us gently open the door upon the five-colored treasure said to be enshrined deep within the main hall and shown to the world only once every five years — the Goshiki-shinmen, the Masks of the Five-Colored Gods. Within those five colors are hidden the true identity of the descended gods, and the grand message this shrine continues to send out to all of humanity.

Chapter 3: The Goshiki-shinmen — The Secret Treasure Opened Only Once in Five Years

A shrine has treasures that are seldom seen by human eyes.

The go-shintai (the sacred body of the god), the shrine’s treasures, hidden Buddhas — the names vary, but they are things unveiled only on a very few days, once a year or once in several years. Ordinarily they are held fast, deep within the main hall, far from the gaze of people. Why hide them? Because it is precisely by being hidden that their sanctity is preserved. What anyone can see at any time eventually loses its preciousness. But a thing that shows its form only once in five years preserves its holiness across time.

Within Japanese Shintō there is, from the beginning, a deeply rooted reverence for “what must not be seen.” In myth, Izanagi looked upon the form of his wife Izanami in the land of Yomi, though he had been told “do not look,” and so something irreparable came to pass. Toyotama-hime, when the promise “do not look” upon her in childbirth was broken, departed for the sea. Sacred things preserve their power by being covered and hidden. When laid bare and exposed in broad daylight, the holy often loses its power. To conceal, to hide, to show only rarely — this itself is a part of faith. The secret treasure held deep within Hifuri Jingū is exactly such a thing. Its name is the Goshiki-shinmen — the Masks of the Five-Colored Gods.

Red, white, yellow, black, blue. Masks shaped into human faces, painted in five distinct colors. These are the Goshiki-shinmen. These five masks are not mere ritual implements. According to the shrine’s tradition, each is said to represent the “ancestral god” of one of the five colors of humanity living upon the earth — that is, the original ancestor of every human being in the whole world.

What does a person feel when standing before these masks? Each mask is not the face of any particular individual. Each is the root of countless people who live a single “color,” gathered into one face. So to gaze upon these masks may be like peering into a mirror. The innermost face of someone living somewhere in the world, someone whose skin color differs from your own. And trace it far enough, and it connects, somewhere, to your own face as well. The five masks are five portraits of the great family that is humankind. The painted colors are vivid, yet the expressions are somehow quiet, drawing the viewer’s heart back into deep antiquity.

When you think about it, this is a staggering conception.

The world holds countless shrines and temples, churches and mosques. Most of them offer prayer for a particular people, or for the people of a particular region. A Japanese shrine for the Japanese, a local shrine for the people of that land. That, surely, is the natural form of faith. But Hifuri Jingū goes far beyond that frame. What is enshrined here is not only the Japanese. People with red skin, people with white skin, people with yellow skin, people with black skin, and people who are blue. All the colors of humanity living upon the earth. This small shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū enshrines, under one roof, the ancestors of every one of them.

— But here, some may have noticed a strange fact.

People with white skin, people with black skin, people with yellow skin. These are people who actually live, right now, somewhere in the world. Their faces come readily to mind. But what of the remaining two — “people with red skin” and “people with blue skin”? Are there, right now, somewhere on the earth, peoples with red skin or blue skin? There is a way of calling Native Americans “red.” But peoples with literally red skin, literally blue skin — no such groups are to be found on the actual earth.

Of the five ancestral gods, three overlap with real humanity. But red and blue alone are nowhere to be found. Where on earth did they go? Were they never there to begin with? Or were they once on the earth, and at some point vanished?

This question is far deeper than it appears. And pursuing its answer, we will eventually leave this earth’s surface behind and descend to a wholly unexpected place — far below, beneath our very feet. But that is a story for later. For now, hold this small sense of unease — the “absence of red and blue” — in a corner of your heart. It awaits us once more, at the deepest place in this story.

This is without parallel in the world. A sacred site that offers prayer for all the humanity of the entire world is not a thing one finds easily. It is because of the existence of these Goshiki-shinmen that Hifuri Jingū is said to be not a mere local tutelary shrine, but a place that continues to send out a grand message addressed to all of humankind.

Survey the creation myths of the world, and the originality of this conception stands out sharply. The myths of many peoples tell that “we ourselves are the first humans.” A god created our people specially; we ourselves are the chosen people — such chosen-people thought appears again and again in myths the world over. But the story of the goshikijin (the five-colored peoples) of Hifuri Jingū is not like that. It is not that the Japanese alone are special; rather, it tells that all the peoples of the world are kin, branched out from a single source. Of course, as we shall see later, the legend of the goshikijin also contains the thought of Japan as the source — “the Japanese as descendants of the golden people.” But what flows at its foundation is not the superiority of a particular people, but the thought of the shared root and harmony of all humankind. It enshrines not “us alone” but “all of us.” In this one point, the thought of Hifuri Jingū gives off a singular radiance even among the world’s many creation myths.

There is a day when these Goshiki-shinmen show their form to the world.

The Goshiki-shinsai. Held every year on the twenty-third of August, it is this shrine’s most important festival. And once every five years, that year alone becomes a “grand festival.” Only in the year of the grand festival are the Goshiki-shinmen, held deep within the main hall, unveiled, and worshippers may behold the form ordinarily never to be seen. The next chance is five years away again. How many times in a lifetime can one be present? Thought of that way, the weight of making the journey to this festival comes through, little by little.

In fact, there was a period when this Goshiki-shinsai had lapsed. Across its long history, the festival’s flame had nearly gone out. Its full revival came in the year 1995. Just at the time when, having passed through the postwar high-growth era, people had begun to seek the “heart” and the “connection” that lie beyond material abundance, this old festival was reborn. An era in which the world was globalizing, and yet at the same time the conflicts of peoples and religions were growing ever more serious. That a festival praying to such a world — “humanity was originally one; be in harmony” — should revive as if called by the age, may not be mere coincidence. Thereafter, to the grand festival held every five years, people began to gather from within Japan and abroad, as if drawn by that prayer. An old myth came back to life, bearing a new meaning, in the very midst of the modern age.

This Goshiki-shinsai is rooted in an ancient tradition. According to what the shrine tells — in the far, far distant past, the great ancestors of all humanity upon the earth, the goshikijin of red, white, yellow, black, and blue, gathered together in this place and performed a ritual to bring about the “harmony” of their spirits. The ancestors of all the world’s humanity gathered at this navel of Kyūshū and offered a prayer to become one — that, it is said, is the origin of the Goshiki-shinsai. Even now, once every five years, as if to re-enact that ancient gathering, people gather to this place from all over the world.

Indeed, in the year of the grand festival, many attendees are said to visit even from abroad. People of differing skin colors, differing languages, differing religions gather before this small shrine and offer prayer together. That very scene revives the legend of the goshikijin in the present age.

Imagine it. An August precinct in a mountain hollow, the cries of cicadas pouring down. Through the dense stand of cedars, the summer light slants in, ray upon ray. Beneath it, people gathered from all over the world sit quietly. Skin colors of every kind, attire of every kind. Soon the rite begins, and the voice of the norito (the Shintō prayer) rings out through the forest. The doors of the main hall, opened only once in five years. From within, the five masks of red, white, yellow, black, and blue reveal their form. The faces of humanity’s ancestral gods, said to have been handed down across fifteen thousand years. Before them, people of differing nationalities and religions are wrapped in a single prayer. In this instant, the harmony ritual of the goshikijin said to have been performed here in antiquity becomes not an event within myth, but a reality unfolding before one’s eyes. Time turns full circle and joins. This festival, it is said, holds that strange sensation.

A person who attended one grand festival wrote down the priest’s words like this: the Goshiki-shinsai is a festival that enshrines the goshikijin, the ancestral gods of the world’s humanity, and prays for a “world of harmony” in which all the earth’s humanity acknowledges and helps one another.

In this one word, “harmony,” lies the heart of the thought of Hifuri Jingū.

Here I would like to pause a little on the number “five” and on the five colors. The combination of five colors is, in fact, deeply rooted in Eastern thought. In the theory of yin-yang and the five phases (gogyō), which arose in ancient China, the world is composed of five elements — wood, fire, earth, metal, and water — to each of which a color was assigned: blue (green), red, yellow, white, and black. By direction: the blue of the east, the red of the south, the yellow of the center, the white of the west, the black of the north. These five colors were a symbol of the “whole” that represents all of the world. The five-colored curtains seen at Japanese shrines, and the five-colored streamers attached to the carp banners of the Boys’ Festival, all trace back, in origin, to this thought. That is, the five colors are not five separate things, but a completed array of color that together represents the “whole of the world.” That Hifuri Jingū grasped humanity in five colors resonates, at a deep level, with this Eastern cosmology — five that are one, one whole though diverse. The Goshiki-shinmen are, so to speak, the “whole that is humanity,” condensed into five colors and made visible.

The five colors. They are the diversity of the world’s humanity itself. Skin colors differ. Cultures differ. Languages differ. The things believed in differ. Over these differences, humanity has repeated its conflicts since the dawn of history. But the Goshiki-shinmen grasp these five colors not as things in opposition, but as the “divided forms” of what was originally one. Red, white, yellow, black, and blue — trace them back, and they are brothers born of the same single source. That colors differ does not mean being enemies. Rather, they are many-colored children born of the same parent. So do not fight; acknowledge one another, help one another, be in harmony. That is the message to humanity this shrine has continued to send out, through these five-colored masks, across fifteen thousand years.

Even seen through our modern eyes, this is a startlingly universal — and urgent — message. In the world, even now, conflicts over differences of skin color, people, and religion never cease. It is precisely because of such an age that the thought of the goshikijin — “we were originally one” — rings out not as a stale old myth, but rather as a prayer directed toward the future. One priest is said to have spoken of prayer and the norito as “joy.” To receive, as far as possible with a heart of joy, the various things that happen in the world, and to live while seeing things from that viewpoint — that very attitude, he said, is what matters. Harmony is not the defeating of someone. It is to rejoice in being together, while still holding our differences. The Goshiki-shinmen quietly indicate that state of mind, in five colors.

And clinging to these Goshiki-shinmen is a further, more daring tradition.

Among the shrine’s treasures, besides the Goshiki-shinmen, there are said to be things called the Suiō (Water King) and the Kaō (Fire King). Water and fire. These two opposing, fundamental powers, too, are hidden deep within this shrine. Furthermore, in a view held by some, the red mask among the Goshiki-shinmen is the “mask of Moses,” and is sometimes spoken of in connection with Moses, the prophet who appears in the Old Testament. There is even a tradition that the “Orb of Water,” said to be a Jewish secret treasure, was brought to the precincts.

These tales already spill far beyond the frame of Japanese myth. Why does this shrine, which enshrines the ancestral gods of all the world’s humanity, somehow connect to Moses of the Old Testament and to a Jewish secret treasure? One can, of course, dismiss it as absurd. But it is precisely because it is a shrine that speaks of the source of all the world’s humanity that it would not be strange for it to connect, somewhere, to every myth and scripture in the world — and once one begins to think that way, a chill runs down the spine. As for this story surrounding the Orb of Water and Moses, let us delve into it carefully again in a later chapter.

For now, I would like to return to the question before us.

The goshikijin, said to be represented by the Goshiki-shinmen. The ancestral gods of humanity — red, white, yellow, black, blue. Who, exactly, are they? Did the world’s humanity truly arise from a single place, divide into five colors, and scatter across the world? And where did that story come from?

The official lineage of Hifuri Jingū — the formal history of enshrining Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto and the gods of Ise — does not, in fact, contain this tale of the goshikijin. The story of the goshikijin is recorded in another place. It is within a certain koshi-koden (ancient historical lore), said to be older than the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. In the next chapter, we will at last unravel the true identity of the goshikijin — within what myth the ancestral gods of red, blue, yellow, white, and black have been told. And there, once more, we will run up against the question from before. Red and blue, not to be found on the earth. Where did they come from, and where did they vanish? The entrance to that answer lies in the next chapter. Let us at last open the door upon another myth — one that shakes the common sense of this country.

Chapter 4: Who Are the Goshikijin? — The Ancestral Gods of the Five Colors

The goshikijin. Humanity bearing five colors — red, white, yellow, black, and blue.

When they first hear this word, many people are surely seized by a strange sensation. To grasp humanity by “five colors.” To grasp the differences of skin color not as opposition or as superiority and inferiority, but as five branches diverging from a single root. This conception both resembles and decisively differs from the idea of “race” that we know today. For where the word “race” has often been used as a tool of discrimination and division, at the root of the word goshikijin flows, from the very beginning, the thought of harmony — “we were originally one.”

In the previous chapter, we looked at the Goshiki-shinmen that enshrine these five-colored ancestral gods. And we ran up against one strange fact. Of the five colors, three — white, yellow, and black — overlap with people who actually live somewhere in the world today. But red and blue alone are to be found nowhere on the earth. That was the unease.

In this chapter, we step one pace further toward the true nature of that unease. Where, in the first place, are the goshikijin spoken of? Who are they, and where did red and blue vanish?

First, there is something that must be made clear. The story of the goshikijin does not appear in the “official lineage” of Hifuri Jingū. The shrine tradition that Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto raised the streamer (hei). The record that Ise was enshrined here in the Engi era. Within such official history, the word goshikijin does not, in fact, appear. Then where are the goshikijin spoken of? It is within a certain koshi-koden (ancient historical lore), said to be older than the Kiki — the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Its name is the Takeuchi Monjo (the Takeuchi Documents).

This Takeuchi Monjo we will treat carefully in the next chapter. Here, let us first look only at the figure of the goshikijin as recorded within it. According to the Takeuchi Monjo, the world once held five fundamental races: the red people, blue people, yellow people, white people, and black people. They do not necessarily coincide with the classifications we use now, such as “the yellow race” or “the white race.” Roughly, they are spoken of like this. The red people: Jews, Native Americans, Arabs, and the like. The blue people: Northern Europeans, Slavs, and the like. The yellow people: the Mongoloid peoples of Asia, such as the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. The white people: the Caucasoids of Europe. The black people: Indians, Africans, the peoples of Melanesia, and the like.

And the most important point. These goshikijin were not each born separately. They diverged from a single source, the Takeuchi Monjo tells. The original humanity was born here in the land of Japan, spread out to all regions of the world, and, under the influence of the climate and natural features of each land, branched into the red, blue, white, and black peoples. The source was one. This coincides precisely with the core thought of Hifuri Jingū that has appeared again and again in the previous chapters.

However, as to which specific peoples of the world each color of the goshikijin corresponds to, accounts differ considerably from teller to teller. For instance, in the tradition of one Shintō school, the red people are Americans, the blue people Australians, the yellow people Asians, the black people Africans, and the white people Europeans. In yet another view, the blue people are assigned to the peoples of the Pacific islands such as Polynesia and Hawaii. There is a view making the red people Arabs and Jews, and another making them Native Americans. In short, the correspondence between the five colors and real peoples is, from the very start, somewhere vague and wavering. This “wavering” is, in fact, an important clue. That the correspondence will not settle neatly may indicate that the goshikijin were, from the beginning, beings spoken of by a principle other than real racial classification.

Now, let us return to the unease from before.

Yellow people = Asian; white people = European; black people = African. These three can somehow be matched to real humanity. But what of the red people and the blue people? It is true that, historically, there was a way of calling Native Americans “red.” There is also a view connecting Northern Europeans with “blue.” But that is, after all, metaphor and association; it is not that groups of people with literally red skin, literally blue skin, exist on the actual earth. Three of the colors overlap with real humanity, yet red and blue alone are left somehow hanging in the air.

In fact, this point — that “only the red and blue people cannot be found” — is the greatest mystery, pointed out from of old, within the discussions surrounding the goshikijin. Were they never there to begin with? Or were they once on the earth, and at some point vanished?

Here there is one bold view.

The red people and the blue people had human form, but were they not beings a little different from us? And they exist even now. Not on the earth’s surface, however — but beneath the earth.

It may sound absurd. But what the people who advance this view raise as a clue is none other than a certain being deeply familiar to the Japanese.

The red oni and the blue oni (demons/ogres).

When you think about it, is it not strange? The oni that appear in Japan’s old tales and traditions are, for some reason, always red and blue. One does not much hear of a green oni or a white oni. Red oni, blue oni. This pairing of two colors matches, splendidly, the two colors of the goshikijin that vanished from the earth. Is this mere coincidence?

What are the oni, in origin? In folklore studies, the oni are taken to be “dwellers of the other world” who live deep in the mountains. Unsubmitting ones who live in mountains far from human settlements and now and then come down to the village. In one view, they are the figures of indigenous peoples who lived in the mountains in antiquity, of people who did not submit to the rule of Yamato, handed down in the form of oni. And there is a view that those very “unsubmitting oni” were the red and blue people who vanished from the earth.

This view of “oni = unsubmitting people” has, in fact, been discussed in folklore studies from of old. In the process by which the Yamato court unified the land, there were people who did not submit to its rule and were driven into the mountains and the frontiers. The Tsuchigumo, the Kuzu, the Emishi — people recorded in the official histories as unsubmitting ones, as peoples beyond the pale of civilization. They were often depicted as inhuman, monstrous beings. With horns sprouting, in fearsome forms. When the victors write history, those who were defeated and vanished into the mountains often become “oni.” If so, then folded into the depths of the red-oni and blue-oni traditions there may be the distant memory of people who certainly once existed on this archipelago, but were erased from the main stage of history. To overlay those vanished people upon the red and blue of the goshikijin — this conception has a strange persuasiveness. Those erased from history, and the colors that vanished from the goshikijin. The two meet at a single point: the oni.

Step further, and it becomes this. Where is the “other world” the oni are said to dwell in? Deep in the mountains, mountain passes, caverns. Bordering on these, another world connected to the present world. In Buddhism, the place where the oni are is the lowest layer of the six realms, hell. Hell is beneath the earth. That is, the oni come from beneath the earth —

What symbolically embodies this view is that famous Namahage handed down on the Oga Peninsula of Akita Prefecture. On the night of New Year’s Eve, monstrous beings wearing oni masks visit the houses. Crying out, “Are there any bad children?” These Namahage are precisely the red oni and blue oni, and in tradition they are marebito — visiting gods who come from beyond the sea, or from deep in the mountains. And there is a view that reads these oni as the memory of subterranean people rising up from beneath the earth. The indigenous people who lived in Japan’s mountains, beings of the other world connected to the depths of the earth. They have long survived, within our folktales, as the red and blue oni.

There is one more intriguing clue. The Mōko-han — the Mongolian spot.

In Mongoloid babies, beginning with the Japanese, a blue, bruise-like pigment appears around the buttocks at birth. It is that Mongolian spot, which fades away as one grows. In some views, this is the last vestige of the “blue people” blood that once flowed within us. Only at the most innocent time, just after birth, does a blue mark surface on the body, and then vanish. It is as if the body secretly remembers that we were descendants of the blue people. Scientifically, the Mongolian spot is an utterly common physiological phenomenon, appearing blue because melanin pigment remains in a deep layer of the skin. But before the story of the goshikijin, the urge to reinterpret it as “the memory of the blue people” is not hard to understand.

Even so, one thinks. If blue-people blood truly does flow within us Japanese. If one color of the goshikijin, said to have vanished from the earth, surfaces blue upon our very bodies for the moment of birth alone. Then is that not, more than anything, proof that those who vanished beneath the earth and we who remained upon it are in fact branched brothers, divided from the same root? The red and blue beneath the earth, the yellow upon it. Though the colors differ and the worlds they live in differ, trace them back and they are one. The story of the goshikijin, in the end, converges everywhere upon a single point: “we were all, once, one.”

Come this far, and one grand schematic dimly rises into view.

And the conception of people who vanished beneath the earth is, in fact, not Japan’s alone. Across the world, traditions surrounding dwellers of the subterranean world are distributed astonishingly widely. The “hollow earth theory,” that an ideal land lies beneath the earth. The sacred subterranean kingdom spoken of in the traditions of Tibet and India. The dwarves and fairies appearing in Norse and Celtic myth, who dwell underground or in burial mounds. East and West alike, humanity has imagined, again and again, that “beneath the earth at our feet there is another world.” Why do so many cultures speak of a subterranean world in the same way? Is it a mere coincidence of fancy? Or is there, behind it, some shared memory? The story that the red and blue of the goshikijin sank beneath the earth may connect, somewhere, to these subterranean traditions the world over. Thought of that way, the tradition of a small shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū suddenly connects to a mystery on a planetary scale.

In antiquity, the goshikijin were born in this land. In time they scattered to the world, and yellow, white, and black put down roots in the various regions of the earth. But the red and blue people alone, for some reason, vanished from the earth’s surface and sank beneath the earth. And there they built a world of their own underground, and continue to exist there even now. The forms in which they now and then appeared upon the earth seemed to our ancestors to be “oni,” and were left behind as the red-oni and blue-oni traditions.

Of course, here I must honestly note: this is not the lineage that Hifuri Jingū officially tells. That the goshikijin are recorded in the Takeuchi Monjo is fact, but the tale that those red and blue people are subterranean folk and oni is, rather than the Takeuchi Monjo itself, an “interpretation” assembled by later researchers and occult seekers, joining together various traditions. It is not academically substantiated history. Here I want to draw a clear line.

But — having drawn the line, one still thinks this, too.

Why are Japan’s oni red and blue? Why is it just the red and blue of the goshikijin that cannot be found upon the earth? Why does a blue mark surface on our bodies for the moment of birth alone? Each one is, by itself, no more than a scattered legend or phenomenon. But when they are joined by the single line of “the red and blue people are beneath the earth,” strangely enough, everything begins to resonate. There is no evidence. And yet, what on earth is this comfort of resonance?

From here, the story of the goshikijin at last leaves the earth’s surface behind. The red and blue people said to have vanished beneath the earth. The underground world they are said to have built. The door upon that we will open, fully prepared, at the deepest place in this story — in Chapter 10. Until then, please do not forget this sensation: “the red and blue are beneath the earth.”

But before that, we must first return to the source of the story of the goshikijin itself. That ancient historical lore which is the source of all — the Takeuchi Monjo. Said to be older than the Kiki, an entirely different, grand other myth from this country’s official history. In the next chapter, let us open the door upon that sealed book.

Chapter 5: The Takeuchi Monjo and the Golden People — Another Myth and the Theory of Origins in Japan

So far, within the story surrounding Hifuri Jingū, we have heard, again and again, the name of a single book. The source of the goshikijin. Another myth, said to be older than the Kiki (the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki). At that source lies the Takeuchi Monjo (the Takeuchi Documents).

In this chapter, we at last open the door upon that sealed book. But before that, there is one thing I would like to promise. In this chapter, we first savor, at length, the “world the Takeuchi Monjo tells.” And then, at the chapter’s end, we honestly touch upon its “other face” as well — how it is treated academically. The part of light, and the part of shadow. Only by seeing both does the true figure of this strange book rise into view.

First, what is the Takeuchi Monjo?

Its provenance is, in itself, as intricate as a story. A group of old documents, stones, iron swords, and the like, said to have been handed down across generations in the Takeuchi family of Isohara-machi (present-day Kitaibaraki City) in Ibaraki Prefecture. These are collectively called the Takeuchi Monjo. The one who made them public was a man named Takeuchi Kiyomaro. In 1911 he established the Kōso Kōtai Jingū in Isohara-machi and founded a religion called Amatsukyō. And in 1928 (Shōwa 3), he revealed the existence of this group of documents to the world.

The provenance the Takeuchi Monjo claims is grander still. According to it, the originals were recorded in jindai moji — characters said to have been used in remote-antiquity Japan, long before kanji were transmitted. Receiving the imperial command of the twenty-fifth emperor, Buretsu, Heguri no Matori, a grandson of Takenouchi no Sukune, translated them into a text mixing kanji and katakana. The Takeuchi family, it is said, is a house descended from the lineage of this Heguri no Matori. There were originals in jindai moji; the ancient court had them translated; and a particular family secretly guarded and handed them down — an utterly esoteric-seeming provenance.

This “jindai moji” (the script of the age of the gods) is itself fraught with a great mystery. Generally, the accepted view is that Japan had no script of its own until kanji were transmitted. But in the world of ancient historical lore, remote-antiquity Japan, before kanji, is said to have had a writing system of its own. What is more, believers in the Takeuchi Monjo go so far as to claim that this jindai moji was the very “origin” of the world’s scripts — later ancient Egyptian writing, Hebrew, Hangul, the alphabet, and so on. That the world’s scripts all derived from Japan’s jindai moji — this, too, is an expression of the single thick thread of thought running through the Takeuchi Monjo: “Japan as the source of world civilization.” Even writing, it would have it, spread from Japan to the world.

Then what does its content tell?

What the Takeuchi Monjo depicts is a world history utterly unlike the Japanese history we learned in school. There, from a staggering antiquity, Japan had emperors. And not only that — emperors of a super-antiquity, continuing for generation upon generation far before Emperor Jimmu, ruled the world. More astonishing still, it even records that the founders of the world’s religions — Moses, Christ, Shakyamuni, Confucius — all visited Japan, received teachings from the emperor, and served him. That is, in the world of the Takeuchi Monjo, Japan itself is the center of world civilization, and humanity’s civilization and religions all began here in Japan and spread out to the world.

Staggering. So staggering one might laugh. Surrounding the Takeuchi Monjo, for instance, there has even derived the astonishing tale that Christ did not, in fact, die on the hill of Golgotha, but crossed over to Japan and lived out his natural span in the land of Aomori. There is actually a place in a certain village of Aomori Prefecture taken to be “Christ’s grave,” and it is said that the Takeuchi Monjo was the occasion of its discovery. Moses, too, is said to have come to Japan and undergone ascetic training. Absurdity itself. But here, recall the core thought of Hifuri Jingū we have seen in the previous chapters. The source was one. The world’s humanity arose from a single place and scattered to the world. The claim the Takeuchi Monjo tells — “Japan was the source of world civilization” — resonates splendidly with this worldview of Hifuri Jingū. And indeed, the story of the goshikijin handed down at Hifuri Jingū is firmly positioned within this very worldview of the Takeuchi Monjo.

And there is something not to be overlooked. This claim of the Takeuchi Monjo — that the world’s religious figures came to Japan — casts a shadow over Hifuri Jingū itself. The “mask of Moses” among the Goshiki-shinmen, touched on briefly in the previous chapter, and the Jewish secret treasure, the “Orb of Water,” said to be handed down in the precincts. Why does Moses, the prophet of the Old Testament, connect to a shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū? It is one manifestation of the grand worldview the Takeuchi Monjo depicts — “the world’s holy figures visited Japan.” This story surrounding the Orb of Water and Moses we will follow carefully again in a later chapter. The Takeuchi Monjo thus casts its grand shadow over every part of Hifuri Jingū.

Here, let us delve into yet another myth bound to Hifuri Jingū.

The Japanese myth we know — the story of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki — begins like this. The two gods Izanagi and Izanami give birth to the land; in time Amaterasu-Ōmikami is born; there is the descent of the heavenly grandson, when her grandson Ninigi descends to the earth; and further, his descendant ascends as the first emperor, Jimmu. This is the story of this country’s beginning that the official histories tell.

But Hifuri Jingū hands down another, separate Takamagahara myth. It is a story from far, far before Izanagi and Izanami. Two deities called Kamuroki-no-Mikoto and Kamuromi-no-Mikoto are said to have descended to this place riding on a ball of fire. The “gods riding on a ball of fire” who descended onto the crown of the sacred tree, touched on in Chapter 2, are precisely these two deities.

And here is the heart of it. These two deities gave birth to the original humanity, the “yellow people” (kibito) — that is, the Japanese. And these yellow people spread out to the various regions of the world, and under the influence of the climate and natural features of each land, branched into the red, blue, white, and black peoples. That is, humanity was born here in this land of Hifuri, and scattered from here to the world. This, it says, is the land of humanity’s origin.

Gods descending riding on a ball of fire. Upon this description, we moderns cannot help wanting to overlay something else. A vehicle that flies in tearing through the sky and alights upon the earth, giving off light — a spacecraft. It is no wonder there are those who read the “ball of fire” the Takeuchi Monjo tells as a visitor from space who flew in during antiquity. The gods “came down” from heaven. Is that heaven the sky, or is it the far reaches of the cosmos? The words of myth still never cease to stir our imagination.

Now, the yellow people, the origin of the goshikijin, were taken to be the Japanese. But in the world of the Takeuchi Monjo, a being that goes still further beyond appears.

The kinjin, or koganebito — the golden people.

According to the Takeuchi Monjo, the Japanese are not mere yellow people. They are descendants of the “golden people” who transcend the goshikijin. The further origin of the five colors. The very center of the source of all humanity. That is the golden people, and the Japanese are their direct descendants, it says. In one view, it is even told that Japan’s imperial house is a being drawing the legitimate blood of these golden people.

Come this far, and one must also turn one’s eyes to the danger this thought holds. The claim that “the Japanese are the very center of the world, and the most noble” could, one step astray, tip over into a dangerous chosen-people thought, an ethnocentrism. Indeed, the Takeuchi Monjo has a history of being raised up, in a certain period before the war, by ultranationalists as a “book of glad tidings” substantiating Japan’s superiority. The world’s civilizations all began in Japan — that story was, within the air of the times, exploited by a certain kind of ideology. This point should be clearly remembered as a part of the shadow of the Takeuchi Monjo.

Yet what is intriguing here is that the goshikijin thought of Hifuri Jingū evades that danger at an exquisite point. It is true that the claim of Japan as the source — “golden people = Japanese” — is included. But what the Goshiki-shinmen enshrine is not the Japanese alone. They enshrine, on equal terms, the ancestral gods of all the colors — red, white, yellow, black, blue. And what they pray for is not the victory of a particular people, but the “harmony” of all humanity. Even if the source lies in Japan, the five-colored peoples branched from it are all equal brothers — the center of gravity of the story of the goshikijin is placed on the side not of superiority but of harmony. While drawing on the same Takeuchi Monjo as its source, Hifuri Jingū sublimates that thought toward the prayer of humanity’s shared root, not toward chosen-people thought.

— Now. So far, we have looked at length at the “world the Takeuchi Monjo tells.” Gods riding on a ball of fire, the yellow people, the golden people, Japan as the land of humanity’s origin. A grand story, full of romance.

But, as promised, at the last we must touch upon the other face.

The Takeuchi Monjo is, academically, taken to be a “forgery” (gisho). This is a fact that must be clearly written down. Researchers have judged, for a number of reasons, that it was made in the modern era — from Meiji through Shōwa. That the words and the manner of writing used in the text are too new to be ancient. That its provenance is unclear. That its recorded content contradicts, at every turn, established history and archaeological knowledge. The things taken to be the originals were confiscated by the authorities in the prewar suppression, then are said to have burned in the Great Tokyo Air Raid, and do not survive. Even if one wished to verify, there is no actual object to confirm.

Let us touch on this “suppression,” too. The story of super-antiquity emperors that the Takeuchi Monjo preaches was regarded as dangerous by the prewar state as something violating the sanctity of the imperial house. In the 1930s, Takeuchi Kiyomaro and the Kōso Kōtai Jingū were charged with lèse-majesté and the like, suffered the authorities’ suppression, and some four thousand items of the Takeuchi Monjo, including the sacred treasures, were confiscated. Kiyomaro is said to have ultimately won acquittal at trial, but the confiscated articles were never returned and are said to have burned in the war damage. Ironically, a book that should have raised Japan up to the maximum — “Japan is the very center of the world” — was suppressed by that very Japanese state itself. This twisted history, too, is part of the extraordinary provenance of the being that is the Takeuchi Monjo. Even in a world-authoritative encyclopedia, the Takeuchi Monjo is clearly cited as an example that “was talked about under the billing of a history book predating the Kojiki, but was later proven to be a modern forgery.”

That is, the grand story the Takeuchi Monjo tells — “Japan was the source of world civilization” — is not recognized as historical fact. This is a conclusion to be honestly received.

Then does the Takeuchi Monjo have no value at all? It does not, I think.

Even if it is not historical fact, the Takeuchi Monjo is one grand “book of dreams” spun out by the Japanese of the modern era. Why did the people of this age need so great a story? Why did they want to tell that the world’s humanity was originally one, that Japan was its source? Projected there, in deep colors, are the earnest wishes, the anxieties, and the pride of people who lived through the age called the modern era. That it is a forgery and that it strikes the human heart do not contradict each other. Precisely because it is not fact, the human wish that “this is how it should be” may crystallize there in a purer form.

And above all — the real sacred site that is Hifuri Jingū, bearing this worldview of the Takeuchi Monjo, still exists quietly within the mountains even now. Once in five years, the Goshiki-shinmen are opened, people gather from all over the world, and pray for harmony. That scene is, whether the Takeuchi Monjo is a forgery or not, a reality that certainly exists. Whether a story is fact, and whether that story has the power to move people, are separate questions.

Opening the door of the Takeuchi Monjo, we have arrived at the golden people. The being taken to be the source of all, the center of all. But Hifuri Jingū enshrines yet another, staggering god that resonates with the thought of these golden people. The parent god of all things. The name of that god, said to be involved in the creation of the cosmos itself — let us look at it in the next chapter.

Chapter 6: Ōtonochi-Ōkami — The Parent God of All Things, Enshrined Only Here

When we worship at a shrine, we usually do not pay much mind to which god is enshrined there. We press our palms together, bow our heads, and put our wishes into the prayer. Few people stop to confirm, one by one, which specific god the recipient is.

But trace, deity by deity, the names of the gods enshrined at Hifuri Jingū, and at a certain stage you are seized by a strange sensation, as if your spine were drawing itself up straight. For what is enshrined here is no ordinary set of gods. It is the cosmos itself. The parent of all things. Beings that dwell at the very root from which heaven and earth are born.

Let us list the principal enshrined deities of Hifuri Jingū in order. Kamuroki-no-Mikoto, Kamuromi-no-Mikoto, Ōtonochi-Ōkami, Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami, Amaterasu-Ōmikami. These five deities are the central gods. Further, many gods are jointly enshrined, beginning with the Twelve Aso Deities.

Seeing this lineup, the more versed in Shintō one is, the more one may tilt one’s head in puzzlement. It is too far beyond the standard.

Ordinarily, the gods a shrine enshrines have a certain “division of roles.” A god of the sea, a god of the mountains, a god of commerce, a god of learning. Or particular heroes or ancestors enshrined as gods. That is the general figure of a shrine. But the enshrined deities of Hifuri Jingū leap far beyond such individual roles. Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the supreme deity of Japanese myth. Even she is here one of the five deities, in a position close, so to speak, to the “lowest seat.” And above that Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the god of the cosmos itself sits, solidly enthroned.

The name of that god is Ōtonochi-Ōkami.

It is read “Ōtonochi.” It is surely an unfamiliar name. And no wonder, for this god is an extremely singular divinity, said to be enshrined at this Hifuri Jingū and at no other shrine in all of Japan.

What is Ōtonochi-Ōkami? According to what the shrine tells, it is the “parent god of all things.” The cosmos itself. And a being that symbolizes the sense of oneness with every kind of natural thing, including human beings. Not the sea, not the mountains, not a god governing some particular thing. The root within the root, that gives birth to all and enfolds all. The very words that make up its name — “great cosmos,” “great harmony” — already tell of this god’s staggering scale. The great harmony of the great cosmos. That is the essence of this god.

Read this divine name aloud, and one notices something interesting. “Ōtonochi.” In kanji it is written “great cosmos, great harmony” (大宇宙大和) and made to read this way. It is a reading-assignment that, by ordinary readings, would never come out. The staggering concept of the cosmos, and “harmony” (wa) — an utterly Japanese concept meaning concord and accord. The two are joined within a single divine name. The essence of the cosmos is not opposition or chaos but “harmony” — this divine name seems to declare just that. The thought of the goshikijin’s “harmony” (wagō) that has appeared again and again in the previous chapters: when it is expanded to the scale of the cosmos, it becomes the name Ōtonochi-Ōkami. The harmony of humanity, and the harmony of the cosmos. The two are manifestations, at different magnitudes, of the same single truth.

Survey the world’s religions, and the conception of taking such a “root of all things” as a god is by no means rare. The single god of Judaism and Christianity created the world from nothing. In Indian thought, the fundamental cosmic principle called Brahman is taken to be the root of all things. In Chinese Daoism, the “Way” (Tao) that gives birth to all things was spoken of. East and West alike, at the end of the question “where did everything come from,” humanity has found a single root. Ōtonochi-Ōkami, too, is one of Japan’s answers to that question. However, into that answer a color found only in this country — “harmony” — runs deep. The root of all is neither a god who fights nor a god who judges, but a god who harmonizes.

Think about it. The navel of Kyūshū, a small shrine in a mountain hollow. A hidden shrine to which no tour buses come, listed in no guidebook. In its main hall, a god embodying the cosmos itself is enshrined, at one place alone in all of Japan. In this imbalance, in the very magnitude of this disproportion, lies the unfathomableness of Hifuri Jingū. The cosmos, whole, contained within a small vessel. That is the sensation.

Why this place, of all places? Why was it not Ise, not Izumo, but this shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū that became the sole land to enshrine the parent god of all things? That question resonates deeply with everything we have seen in the previous chapters — the lifeline of fifteen thousand years, the origin of the goshikijin, the source of humanity the Takeuchi Monjo tells. Because this is the source of all. Because it is the land of beginning, where the world’s humanity was born and scattered to the world. If so, that the god of the cosmos itself is enshrined in that land may, rather, be only natural. In the land of the source, there is the god of the source.

Following Ōtonochi-Ōkami, there is one more god worthy of note. It is Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami.

This god’s name will be familiar to anyone close to Japanese myth. At the opening of the Kojiki, when heaven and earth first opened, the god who first revealed itself in Takamagahara. That is Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami. Positioned at the center of the cosmos, it is taken to be a god governing harmony and integration. In Japanese myth, it is the very first god, the root god. In Shintō, the first three gods, including this Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami, are called the “Three Gods of Creation” (Zōka Sanshin), and have been regarded as the source of the power that gives birth to all things.

I would like to touch a little more on these Three Gods of Creation. According to the Kojiki, at the beginning of heaven and earth, the gods that came into being in Takamagahara were three: Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami, Takamimusuhi-no-Kami, and Kamimusuhi-no-Kami. What is intriguing is that these three gods are recorded as having “hidden themselves” as soon as they revealed their forms. That is, they do not come out onto the main stage of myth. What moves the story are Izanagi and Izanami, the Amaterasu and the others born much later. The Three Gods of Creation are depicted, so to speak, as an invisible root power held back in the depths of the stage. While giving birth to all, they themselves do not show their forms. This very character of a “hidden root” is what makes Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami an unfathomable god. And that hidden root god is, at Hifuri Jingū, clearly enshrined as a central deity. A god hidden in the depths of myth is here brought out into the open. That alone conveys the extraordinary character of this shrine.

That god, the oldest root god of Japanese myth, is also enshrined here at Hifuri Jingū. Ōtonochi-Ōkami, the god of the cosmos itself, and Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami, the god of the cosmos’s center. The mere fact that these two are enshrined side by side conveys how deeply this shrine is involved with the things called “root,” “center,” and “beginning.”

And Kamuroki-no-Mikoto and Kamuromi-no-Mikoto, the first two listed of the five deities. These two gods, too, are no ordinary ones. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the world of the Takeuchi Monjo, it was precisely these two gods who descended riding on a ball of fire and gave birth to the original humanity, the yellow people. Intriguingly, these names Kamuroki and Kamuromi do not appear in the Kojiki or Nihon Shoki as the names of specific individual gods. In one view, they do not point to particular single deities, but are words that bind together and call all the imperial ancestral gods, from the Three Gods of Creation beginning with Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami down to Amaterasu-Ōmikami. That is, a general name for the root gods. Here, too, the motif of “the root of all” rises up, again and again.

Surveying the enshrined deities of Hifuri Jingū this way, one grand structure rises into view. At the very outside, Ōtonochi-Ōkami, who is the cosmos itself. Within it, Ame-no-Minakanushi-no-Kami, the center of the cosmos. Further, Kamuroki and Kamuromi, who bind together the root gods. And Amaterasu-Ōmikami, the supreme deity of Japanese myth. It is as if a single shrine held, nested within itself, everything from the creation of the cosmos to the beginning of Japan. From the center of the cosmos to the god of the sun. From the macro to the micro. This shrine folds the entire hierarchy of being into its main hall.

And in addition to these grand gods, Hifuri Jingū jointly enshrines the Twelve Aso Deities. The gods of the land of Aso, beginning with Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto. Here lies yet another depth of this shrine. A divinity as abstract and vast as could be — the god of the cosmos itself — and gods rooted in the concrete land of Aso, close to daily life. These two extremes coexist, without strain, within a single shrine. The god of the cosmos beyond the heavens, and the god of the earth at our feet. The universal and the indigenous. In the place where these two join hands lies the distinctive breadth of Japanese Shintō. However grand a cosmology it tells, its feet are firmly planted on the earth of Aso. It does not fly off into ideas alone, but is bound to the land. It may be precisely because of this that this shrine’s cosmic view does not become an empty fantasy, but remains in the hearts of those who visit as a sure, tangible response.

The god of the cosmos and the god of the land. The root god and the god of daily life. Hifuri Jingū enshrines both, without distinction. This may be called one extreme form of the magnanimous, multilayered character peculiar to Japanese Shintō, which holds the yaoyorozu (eight million) gods. It is in contrast to monotheism, which governs all under a single absolute god. Here, the god of the cosmos, the god of the sun, and the god of the land all coexist in one place, each keeping its own position. This is precisely — just as the goshikijin were — the practice, at the level of the gods, of the thought that different things are together in harmony, without opposition.

Here, one great question arises.

Why were so many gods gathered into this one shrine?

One view is this. So long as Hifuri Jingū styles itself “Japan’s oldest,” “the land of humanity’s origin,” “Takamagahara,” the gods enshrined there must, naturally, be gods that trace back to the very root of the cosmos and of humanity. To a grand lineage, grand deities are fitting. So the god of the cosmos itself is enshrined — that is the view.

But there is another view. The order is reversed, it says. That is: it is not that the god of the cosmos was enshrined because a grand lineage was attached afterward, but rather that, precisely because this land was, from the beginning, a special place connected to the root of the cosmos, the ancient people found and enshrined here the god of the cosmos itself. Which is correct, there is no means to confirm. But the fact that many people who have actually stood in this land feel, beyond reason, that “there is something here,” lends a strange reality to the latter view.

Ōtonochi-Ōkami. The parent god of all things. The cosmos itself. Before this god, we may recover a certain sense we usually forget. The sense that the small being that is oneself is, in fact, a part of the great whole that is the cosmos. Just as a single drop of seawater is, in essence, the same as the sea itself. That each one of us is a small fragment, divided out from the great whole that is Ōtonochi-Ōkami.

And this sense — that “everything was divided out from the great whole” — shares its root with the thought of the goshikijin we have seen again and again. Humanity was originally one. The five colors were divided from a single source. — Ōtonochi-Ōkami may be the ultimate expression that pushes that “single source” out to the scale of the cosmos. All is born from one great harmony, and someday returns again to that harmony. The enshrined deities of Hifuri Jingū quietly point to that grand circle.

Once we have pressed our palms together for a while at the main hall enshrining the god of the cosmos, we turn at last toward another face of this sacred site. We leave the shrine of the surface, and descend from behind the main hall into the forest. There lies a mystic pond in which a dragon god sleeps. In the next chapter, we step into the most hidden sanctuary of this shrine — the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine and the Pond of the Water Orb.

Chapter 7: The Higashi-Mitarashi Shrine and the Sacred Water — The Pond Where the Dragon God Sleeps, the Shrine on the Watershed

Up to here, we have looked at the “surface” of Hifuri Jingū. The shrine tradition of Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto, the fifteen-thousand-year-old sacred tree, the goshikijin masks, the Takeuchi Monjo, and the god of the cosmos itself. The main hall that rises upon the ground, and the grand story enfolded within it. Yet the true depth of this shrine does not, in fact, end with the shrine upon the ground.

After pressing one’s palms together at the main hall, walk around to its western side. There, a single torii stands quietly at the entrance to the forest. Beyond it, the very air is utterly different from the bright precinct we have known until now. On the far side of the torii, into a dense stand of cedars, a narrow mountain path leads down, and down, and further down.

From here begins the other face of Hifuri Jingū.

Pass through the torii and begin to descend that mountain path. The way is narrow and steep, and after rain it turns to mud. It is a proper mountain trail, quite impossible in high heels. Great cedars press in from both sides, the sky overhead is covered by branch and leaf, and the light is scant. As one descends, the number of worshippers thins. Most people turn back having worshipped at the main hall alone. Only those who know what lies at the end of this steep descending path, and step onto it nonetheless, go this way. With each step, the world transforms. From the bright shrine of “heaven,” to the dark, damp sanctuary of “earth.” We are, quite literally, descending.

How far one must go down, the path ahead does not show. Two hundred meters or so, perhaps. And then the view suddenly opens.

There, a pond lay.

It is called the “Mizutama Pond” (the Pond of the Water Orb), a quiet pond. At the bottom of the mountain hollow, surrounded by trees, its water surface holds something quietly, yet deeply. And it is precisely in this pond that a dragon dwells.

According to tradition, in this Mizutama Pond the Eight Great Dragon Kings (Hachidai Ryūō) lie in repose. The Eight Great Dragon Kings are guardian deities of Buddhism, kings of the dragons who govern water and rain. Eight great dragon gods who appear even in the Lotus Sutra. The eight dragon kings, beginning with Nanda and Upananda, are known as beings who attended the place where Śākyamuni expounded the Law, and who guard the Buddhist teachings. That such dragon kings sleep coiled at the bottom of this mountain pond — so it is handed down. Stand at the edge of the pond, and beneath the stillness of the water surface, the presence of something vast does indeed seem to lie. Those who can see, see; those who can feel, feel. Even if nothing at all is visible, the taut air of this place will surely reach anyone’s skin.

But why, of all things, a dragon? Among all the cultures of the world, there is no spirit-beast so deeply bound to water as the dragon. Its coiling form calls to mind a swirling current. When it races across the sky, it summons rain clouds and looses lightning. The meandering of rivers and the waves of the sea alike have been overlaid upon the dragon’s movement. In East Asia, the dragon is the very incarnation of the water cycle itself, and for agricultural peoples it was the most important divinity of all, the bringer of rain. In drought they begged for rain; in long rains they prayed for it to subside. The one to whom that prayer was addressed was the dragon. The tradition that a dragon dwells in the Mizutama Pond of Hifuri Jingū tells, more eloquently than anything, that this land is a sacred site deeply bound to the power of water.

And in this sanctuary, one fearsome taboo is handed down.

Violate this pond, violate this sanctuary, and a typhoon will arise — so it is said.

The pond where the dragon god who governs water sleeps. Violate it, and the dragon will rage and summon a tempest. A typhoon, that vast calamity of water and wind. This is no mere threatening tale. Awe of the dragon who rules water, a fundamental dread of the power of nature, is enfolded within this taboo. From ancient times, the Japanese have revered the dragon as a god of water. It sends down rain, makes rivers flow, and at times swallows people in floods. Water is at once a blessing and a calamity. The incarnation of that double-edged power is the dragon. The taboo that one must not violate this pond is an expression of an age-old reverence toward water, a power beyond the reach of human hands. It must not be carelessly disturbed. If one steps in, then with awe, and quietly.

In this Higashi-Mitarashi shrine, together with the Eight Great Dragon Kings, Hokushin Myōken Ōkami is also enshrined. Hokushin refers to the Pole Star. The unmoving star that sits at the center of heaven, around which all stars revolve. The dragon god at the bottom of the earth, and the god of the star at the center of heaven. Here, too, heaven and earth are bound within a single sanctuary.

And in this sanctuary, there is one more treasure. Water.

To begin with, in the word “mitarashi” within this shrine’s name, the sanctity of water is already inscribed. Mitarashi refers to the place at a shrine where, before worship, one rinses the hands and mouth and purifies oneself. To come before the gods, one must first wash away one’s defilement. This act of purifying the body with water is called “misogi” in Shintō. In Japanese myth as well, Izanagi, returned from the land of Yomi, performed misogi in a river, and in that act the gods, beginning with Amaterasu-Ōmikami, were born. To purify with water is not merely to remove filth, but a fundamental work that gives birth to new life and to the sacred. The Higashi-Mitarashi shrine is precisely the sanctuary that governs that “water of purification.” The pond where the dragon god rests, and the water of purification. The theme of water here folds over upon itself, again and again.

Beside the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine, from the end of a bamboo pipe drawn from the spring source, pure spring water flows out, welling endlessly. It is the sacred water (goshinsui). Worshippers receive this water here. Many bring empty plastic bottles and carry it home. Water that wells up deep in the mountains, at the edge of the pond where the dragon god rests. There can be few waters so blessed as this. However, when one draws this water, restraint is required. As a rule, about one plastic bottle per person — such is the rule of this sanctuary. The dragon god’s blessing must not be hoarded for oneself. It is something to be shared.

Yet this sacred water carries one curious tale.

There are two spring mouths. Two bamboo pipes as well. And — the water that issues from the left and right bamboo pipes differs in taste.

Water that wells up from the same mountain, the same sanctuary. Two spring mouths right beside each other. And yet, the one and the other differ in taste. People who have actually drunk and compared them say so with one voice. It is hard to credit at once. But this sacred water, differing in taste from left to right, has long been handed down as one of the Seven Wonders of Hifuri Jingū. Why does the taste differ? Are the underground water veins different? Or is a separate meaning enfolded in each of the two waters? What is certain, one cannot know. But should you visit, by all means take both into your mouth, and confirm the difference with your own tongue.

This sacred water has, moreover, an even older tradition clinging to it.

The imperial grandson Nigihayahi-no-Mikoto — or, as some hand it down, Ninigi-no-Mikoto — is said to have used the sacred water of this Mizutama Pond to go about purifying the whole of Japan. Sacred water that purified the land. It is a grand tradition that water welling up from this place purified all of Japan. Water welling from the navel of Kyūshū spread throughout the entire country and cleansed away its defilement. Here, too, Hifuri Jingū quietly tells its consistent story — that “this land is the source of all.”

Now, the name “Higashi-Mitarashi shrine” (East Mitarashi shrine) calls forth a question. If there is an East, is there no West? — There is. A little apart from Hifuri Jingū, the “Nishi-Mitarashi shrine” (West Mitarashi shrine), also called Nishi-Suijin-gū, sits quietly enshrined. Whereas the eastern Mitarashi bustles with the dragon god and with worshippers, the western Mitarashi, as if dissolving into the surrounding scenery, stands quietly, all but unknown to anyone. East and West, two Mitarashi. This paired arrangement may be no coincidence.

Here, the fact that this shrine stands upon a “watershed” (bunsuirei) takes on weight. A watershed is the ridge that forms the boundary along which fallen rain divides, flowing toward east and west, or in separate directions. Hifuri Jingū stands at very nearly the center of Kyūshū, precisely at the dividing point where water parts east and west. A single drop of rain falling here, by the slightest difference in terrain, will trace an entirely different journey — some water to the eastern sea, some to the western sea. Issuing from the same single point, yet dividing, and reaching different seas —.

Does this not resemble something?

Yes — the goshikijin. The five-colored peoples, born from a single source and dividing, scattering to each region of the world. At this shrine on the watershed, even the water falls from one sky, lands upon one earth, and then divides, setting out toward separate seas. The place that is Hifuri Jingū embodies, in its very location, as terrain, this shrine’s fundamental thought: “the source is one, and from it all divides toward the world.” The East and West Mitarashi, the water parting east and west. This land is no sacred site merely rich in water. It is a sacred site that shows, in visible form, as the flow of water, the cosmic principle that “the one divides.”

There is, further, a tale concerning this water that cannot be passed over.

At the edge of the Mizutama Pond lies a sacred field called the “Yukiden.” It is a divine field where rice is grown by drawing this water of the Higashi-Mitarashi. According to tradition, the “Sukiden,” which originally lay at the Nishi-Mitarashi, was moved to this land of the Higashi-Mitarashi. And the rice-planting festival performed at that time became — astonishingly — the basis of the Daijōsai. The Daijōsai is one of the most important and sacred rites of Shintō, performed by the Emperor only once, at the time of his accession. A rite touching the very foundation of the state, in which newly harvested rice is offered to the gods, and which the Emperor himself partakes of. The origin of that Daijōsai is said to lie here, at the edge of a dragon god’s pond in the mountains of Kyūshū. Beyond the question of fact, what this tradition seeks to tell is clear. This land is also the source of the Imperial House’s most sacred rite — so it says. The source of all. Here, too, that theme is repeated.

From the shrine of heaven, to the pond of earth. We have left the bright main hall and descended to the dark waterside where the dragon god sleeps. And we notice: this shrine holds, together, the story upon the ground and another story that flows like an underground water vein. There is a surface, and there is a depths. There is heaven, and there is earth. There is light, and there is darkness. And that very movement of “descending” already points to the direction in which this whole story is finally bound.

Come to think of it, throughout this shrine we have been continually “descending.” Gods who descended from heaven riding upon a ball of fire. From the star at the center of heaven, to the shrine upon the ground. And from the main hall, two hundred meters down, to the dragon god’s pond. Descend, descend, descend again. That the sacred descends from heaven is the manner in which many myths speak. But at Hifuri Jingū, that “descending” vector does not stop at the ground. It passes beyond the shrine, beyond the earth’s surface, and seeks to head further down. The dragon god’s pond is, on that path, a kind of landing along the way. Just as the water seeps from there toward yet lower places, toward the bottom of the earth, our journey, too, will before long head toward what lies still further below the surface — toward the world at the bottom of the earth.

For water flows toward the low. To the bottom of the earth, and further to the bottom. And in the underground world where the dragon is said to dwell, deep within where the water veins run — there, before long, another vast mystery we must confront waits with its mouth agape. Those red and blue peoples we asked you to hold in mind in Chapters Three and Four. The world of those who are said to have vanished from the ground and slipped into the bottom of the earth lies still deeper within these water veins.

But before that. The sacred water welling in this dragon god’s pond, and the “red mask = the mask of Moses” among the goshikijin masks, and the Jewish hidden treasure said to be handed down within the precinct, the “Orb of Water.” Water, and again water. Why is this shrine so filled with traditions of water? In the next chapter, drawing along that thread of water, we connect to a place beyond all imagining — the distant Middle East, the world of ancient Judaism. The dragon god’s pond of Kyūshū, and the story of Moses. Let us step into that crossing point, hard to credit at first.

Chapter 8: The Door to the Underground Empire — Agartha, Shambhala, and the Goshikijin

Up to here, we have come a long way.

We have looked up at the fifteen-thousand-year-old sacred tree, stood before the goshikijin masks, traced the grand world of the Takeuchi Monjo, pressed our palms together before the god of the cosmos itself, and descended two hundred meters to the pond where the dragon god sleeps. All along that road, we must have walked with one question stuck in our breast like a small thorn.

Where did red and blue vanish to?

Of the goshikijin, three — white, yellow, and black — still live upon the ground even now. But the red people and the blue people — those two colors alone are nowhere to be found anywhere on the actual ground. In Chapter Three we presented this sense of incongruity, and in Chapter Four we touched on one bold answer. They vanished from the ground and slipped down into the bottom of the earth — is that not so? The red oni and blue oni, the Namahage, and the blue Mongolian spot that surfaces on our bodies only when we are born. Are these not all faint memories of the red and blue peoples who vanished underground?

In this chapter, we at last open the door to that “bottom of the earth.”

However, here we must draw a clear line. What follows is in no way the official history Hifuri Jingū conveys. In neither the shrine tradition nor the origins of the enshrined deities does anything from here on appear at all. What we are about to step into is the domain called ultra-ancient history, the occult, urban legend. There is no academic grounding anywhere. And yet — the very moment we step into this domain, the foreshadowings we have laid out all this while bind themselves, uncannily, into a single line. Please see that sight through to the end. This is not a tale of “fact.” It is a tale of “story.” And a fine story can, at times, pierce the truth of the human heart more deeply than fact.

Then let us open the door. The name of the underground empire is — Agartha, and Shambhala.

In the world there is, from ancient times, a tradition like this. Far beneath this very ground on which we stand — the interior of the earth is in fact a hollow cavity, and there, an inner world spreads out, radiating a light like the sun, where people who built a high civilization still dwell even now. This is called the “Hollow Earth theory.” It will sound preposterous. And indeed, science from the modern age onward has completely denied this theory. The interior of the earth has a layered structure of inner core, outer core, mantle, and crust, with no cavity whatsoever. That is the unshakable conclusion of science. This point we set down honestly and clearly.

But even though science denied it, the story of this underground world never, in the imagination of humankind, disappeared. Rather, East and West alike, it has been handed down astonishingly widely and deeply.

In the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, the underground paradise is called “Agartha,” and a secret entrance is said to lie in the mountains of Tibet. In Central Asia, the same subterranean paradise has been known by the name “Shambhala.” Shambhala means “tranquility” in Sanskrit, and “source of happiness” in Tibetan. The name may be unfamiliar, but by its variant “Shangri-La,” you will surely have heard it as a byword for paradise. An eternal paradise hidden at the bottom of the earth. Chosen sages dwell there, and even when the ground above is struck by war and calamity, that place alone quietly keeps its prosperity — that is Agartha, and Shambhala.

The tradition of this underground kingdom, even on entering the modern age, would not release its hold on many people. In 1920, the Polish explorer Ossendowski introduced the underground paradise of Agartha in a travel account. The French esotericist René Guénon, in his work The King of the World, discussed the legend of the underground kingdom Agartha continuing on from Shambhala. Going back further, at the end of the nineteenth century, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre conveyed its existence to the world. And astonishingly, in the myths of various regions across the world, there remain numerous accounts that the entrances to this Agartha are scattered here and there upon the ground, from South America to the polar regions.

It was not only esotericists and explorers who were possessed by this legend. Powerful figures who shook history are also said to have earnestly sought the underground paradise, and the ultra-ancient wisdom and power said to sleep there. Especially famous is Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, and a faction around him steeped in the occult, are said to have sent expeditions into Tibet and earnestly sought the actual existence of Shambhala and Agartha, and the hidden power said to sleep there — called “Vril power” and the like. Those who plotted world conquest tried to find, in a kingdom at the bottom of the earth, the key to their ambition. The fact that the legend of the underground empire did not stop at mere fantasy but came near to moving actual history tells of the unfathomable pull this story possesses. At the bottom of the earth there is “something” with the power to change the world — so many people believed.

In various regions across the world, traditions concerning the underground abound. At Japan’s own feet, too, there is such a thing. For instance, in ancient Ainu myth, a gigantic amemasu (a fish) was said to dwell underground, and when it rampaged, earthquakes occurred. At the bottom of the earth lies something gigantic. When it moves, the ground shakes. — Does this not resonate, at a deep level, with the taboo of Hifuri Jingū’s Mizutama Pond, the tradition that “violate the dragon god’s pond and a typhoon will arise”? A gigantic presence at the bottom of the earth. Anger it, and disaster occurs. People across the world have sensed, in the earth beneath their feet, the presence of something concealing a dreadful power.

In the world, here and there, there are entrances.

— If that is so. If one of those entrances lay in this Japan, at this navel of Kyūshū, what then?

Here, the thorn that had been stuck in our breast begins to throb.

At the bottom of the earth are people who built a civilization and live on. Even when the ground above is in turmoil, they go on dwelling there quietly. — Is this not exactly like that theory we saw in Chapter Four? The red people and the blue people, said to have vanished from the ground and slipped into the bottom of the earth. That story — that they built their own world underground and remain there even now.

Indeed, among those who explore ultra-ancient history, there is a view that clearly binds these two together. Once, upon the ground, all five colors of humanity were present. But at a certain time, a great cataclysm — for instance, a great catastrophe like the Great Flood of Noah told in the Old Testament — struck the ground. At that time, the red people and the blue people fled the raging torrent down into the bottom of the earth and survived. And underground, they built up a paradise that inherited ultra-ancient wisdom. — That, precisely, is Agartha, and Shambhala. The yellow, white, and black peoples who remained on the ground eventually forgot their underground kinsfolk, and handed them down merely as “oni,” within a memory of dread.

When this story is assembled, all we have seen until now connects into a single line. The riddle of the goshikijin. The absence of red and blue. The red oni and blue oni. The Namahage. The Mongolian spot. And the underground kingdom Agartha-Shambhala. The scattered points begin to draw a single constellation. The story of the goshikijin upon the ground was continuous with the story of the underground empire at the bottom of the earth.

Let us imagine, just a little, that underground paradise. Even while the ground above was sealed in glaciers, or swallowed by a great flood, at the bottom of the earth an inner sun cast its pale light, and a warm atmosphere drifted. The red-skinned people and the blue-skinned people, guarding the wisdom inherited from ultra-ancient times, dwell quietly, without strife. Even while their kinsfolk on the ground spent their days in war and calamity, they simply went on being, in harmony. — If such a world truly spreads out beneath our feet. And if they still keep, even now, the “harmony” that we who remained on the ground have forgotten. The red and blue underground may, perhaps, be another version of ourselves, who go on quietly embodying at the bottom of the earth the ideal form that we ground-dwelling humanity have lost sight of. The world of “harmony” for which the goshikijin masks pray may, perhaps, already be realized at the bottom of the earth.

And here, please recall. That throughout this shrine, we have been continually “descending.”

Gods who descended from heaven riding upon a ball of fire. The pond two hundred meters below the main hall, where the dragon god sleeps. Water flows toward the low, toward the bottom of the earth. The sacred site that is Hifuri Jingū contained, from the very beginning, in its very structure, a vector heading from the ground down into the underground. Beneath the surface shrine lies the dragon god’s pond. Then, further below the dragon god’s pond — ? At the end of that question, the underground empire opens its mouth. The underground where the dragon is said to dwell. The depths where the water veins run. There, precisely, spreads the world of the red and blue peoples driven from the ground — and when one thinks so, the “descending” structure of this shrine rises up as a grand metaphor for an entrance to the underground-empire legend.

Furthermore, there is one more thread. The continent of Mu.

The ultra-ancient mother civilization said to have sunk into the Pacific, Mu, which we touched on in Chapter Two. When that Mu sank into the sea in a great catastrophe, where did the people who survived go? By one account, they too fled to the bottom of the earth and became a part of Agartha. And the continent of Mu has been spoken of as deeply bound to Japan, both geographically and culturally. The thought Hifuri Jingū tells, that “Japan is the source of humanity,” and the continent of Mu, and the underground kingdom Agartha — these are woven together, loosely yet surely, by the single thread of the goshikijin.

To repeat: all of this is not verified fact. The Hollow Earth theory is clearly denied by science. Agartha and Shambhala alike are tradition, myth, products of the imagination. Nor does the chief priest of Hifuri Jingū officially speak of this in any way. This we make clear.

But — even so, one is moved to ask.

Why did people across the world dream of a paradise at the bottom of the earth? Why are Japan’s oni precisely the red and blue that vanished from the goshikijin? Why does this shrine possess such a thoroughly “descending” structure? Each one, taken alone, may be an unrelated coincidence. But when one binds them at the single point of the “underground empire,” the world settles into a single story all too beautifully, all too neatly. At that over-tidy correspondence, we cannot help but shudder.

It may not be fact. But the human imagination, for some reason, repeatedly dreams the same dream. The dream that at the bottom of the earth there is another world. The dream that lost kinsfolk go on living there. That very universality of the dream may, perhaps, speak of “something” deeper for humanity than fact itself.

And there is one more thing we must not overlook. Namely, what the act of “descending to the bottom of the earth” has, from ancient times, symbolized. In myth, the hero often descends to the underworld. He visits the land of the dead, passes through trials, obtains something, and returns once more to the ground above. Izanagi too descended to Yomi. The heroes of Greece too visited the realm of the dead. To descend to the bottom of the earth was, at once, to journey through an outer geography and a symbol of slipping down into the deepest place of one’s own heart. From surface consciousness, to the dark bottom of the unconscious. There, one meets something forgotten, something sealed away. That Agartha and Shambhala, even today, still draw the hearts of many people and are handed down in the world of meditation and spirituality, may be because they are not merely geographical places, but another name for the inner depths of we ourselves. The door to the underground empire may, perhaps, open precisely in the depths of our own heart.

We have opened the door to the underground empire. And in its depths, we caught a glimpse of the paradise of the red and blue peoples driven from the ground. But the thread of the story surrounding Hifuri Jingū does not stay at the bottom of the earth alone. In the next chapter, the “red mask = the mask of Moses” among the goshikijin masks, and the Jewish hidden treasure said to be handed down within the precinct, the “Orb of Water.” Let us head toward that strange crossing point where a shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū somehow intersects with the distant Middle East, the world of ancient Judaism. The story of “the source is one” extends its thread beyond even the bottom of the earth, all the way to the far side of the globe.

Chapter 9: The Shadow of Moses and Judaism — The Crossing Point of the Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory

In the preceding chapters, we have several times set down strange words, like foreshadowings. The red mask among the goshikijin masks is said to be the “mask of Moses.” Within the precinct, the Jewish hidden treasure, the “Orb of Water,” is said to be handed down.

A hidden shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū, listed in no guidebook. Why, there, does Moses of the Old Testament appear? Why is an ancient Jewish hidden treasure said to have been carried here, all the way from the distant Middle East? Turning sharply from the previous chapter, where we descended to the bottom of the earth, in this chapter our journey leaps far sideways — to the far side of the globe, to the distant Middle East, the world of ancient Israel. And that distant world, and this navel of Kyūshū, become bound by a single thin thread.

First, let it be noted. The tale we are about to tell is, like the previous chapter, not the official history of Hifuri Jingū. Nor is it an academically recognized history. This is tradition, hypothesis, a story in the domain of romance. On that premise, however, let us draw along that thread which, uncannily, never ceases to draw people in.

The tale returns to the goshikijin masks.

As we saw in Chapter Three, the goshikijin masks are masks of the ancestral gods of humanity, painted in five colors: red, white, yellow, black, and blue. And concerning that red mask, an astonishing tradition is told. This red mask is, of all things, the mask of Moses — so it is said.

Moses. That great prophet who appears in the Book of Exodus of the Old Testament. Receiving the command of God, he led out the Jewish people who had been made slaves in Egypt, parted the sea to bring the people across, and received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai — one of the greatest heroes of the Bible, common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Why is the face of that Moses among the hidden treasures of a shrine in Kyūshū?

To laugh off this tradition as a mere fancy is easy. But here there is one anecdote that cannot so simply be laughed away.

In 1998, a Fukuoka television station produced a special program titled “What Did the Ancients Leave Behind?” In it, the goshikijin masks were taken up. The program, carrying photographs of the goshikijin masks, flew all the way to Israel. And it visited a certain authoritative professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University. The reporter showed photographs of the five masks and asked thus: “Is the face of Moses among these? Which do you think is Moses?”

Whereupon, that professor, without hesitation, pointed to one mask.

It was — the red mask.

The very red mask that had been handed down at Hifuri Jingū as the “mask of Moses” was, with no prior knowledge whatsoever, pointed out as Moses by a specialist in Jewish history. Was it coincidence? The probability of choosing one of five masks is one in five. By no means low. But when one thinks of why that professor chose red, of what he saw in that mask, it begins to seem a shame to dispose of it simply with the single word “coincidence.” Moreover, this professor was a genuine, eminent scholar of Jewish history, also known for his Japanese studies. It was no layman’s guess. The eyes of a specialist who had gazed for long years at Jewish history and physiognomy chose red, without wavering, from among the five masks. The chill, tangible weight of that fact is hard to ignore.

Of course, it was an event in the staged setting of a television program. How far it was rigorous verification, and from where it was a program’s dramatization, that boundary is now beyond any means of confirming. But the very fact that such an anecdote is handed down tells of the unfathomable pull of the goshikijin masks’ existence.

And the other hidden treasure. The “Orb of Water.”

According to tradition, this Orb of Water is a small, transparent stone. And tracing its origin, one arrives straight at the story of Moses and the Exodus. In the Book of Exodus of the Old Testament, it is recorded thus: when the Jewish people escaped from Egypt, by night a “pillar of fire,” and by day a “pillar of cloud,” appeared, lighting and guiding the people’s way. This mysterious light that guided the people — bound up with it, the thing Moses is said to have held in his hand is this “Orb of Water,” so it is said.

Then, how did that Orb of Water come to Japan? Tradition tells it thus. In 722 BC, the ancient Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire. At this time, the ten tribes of Israel that went missing — the so-called “Lost Ten Tribes.” A part of them, at the end of a long, long journey, headed far to the east, and at last reached as far as Kyūshū in Japan. And the very hidden treasure they carried with them was this Orb of Water — so it is said.

These “Lost Ten Tribes” are one of the greatest romances of world history, lying in the space between history and legend. Ancient Israel was originally composed of twelve tribes. Of these, the ten tribes that made up the northern Kingdom of Israel, with the Assyrian conquest, suddenly vanished from the records of history. Where did they go? In various regions across the world, peoples calling themselves “the descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes,” and traditions tracing their footsteps, remain scattered here and there. In Africa, in India, in Central Asia. And as the terminus at the eastern end, the place often named is — Japan. The end of the earth, the land of the rising sun. The promised land they reached at the end of their wandering was this island country of the Far East — so it goes. It is a grand, and somewhere sorrowful, story.

Here, at last, one great idea reveals itself. The “Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory” (Nichiyu Dōsoron).

The Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory is the theory that the Japanese and the ancient Jews — particularly those “Lost Ten Tribes” — share, traced back to their root, the same ancestors, or have a deep connection. This theory is by no means new. Its germ appeared as far back as the seventeenth century, and in the Meiji era, the Scotsman Nicholas McLeod, who came to Japan, systematically compiled the similarities between Japan and ancient Judaism, and is said to have been the first in the world to advocate the Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory. He raised numerous correspondences — the resemblance between the floats of the Gion Festival and Jewish processions, the common points between Japan’s old customs and Jewish rites — and argued that the ancestors of the Japanese came from Israel.

Thereafter, too, the Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory has been handed down, changing form. That Japanese and Hebrew have many words closely resembling each other in pronunciation and meaning. That the shape of the shrine torii calls to mind the Jewish custom of Passover. That the mikoshi (portable shrine) resembles the Jewish “Ark of the Covenant.” That on the lanterns of Ise Jingū, a pattern resembling the Star of David can be seen. — As one lists them, the correspondences are astonishingly many.

Let us look a little more concretely. For instance, it is pointed out that the small black box that yamabushi (mountain ascetics) fasten on their foreheads, the “tokin,” closely resembles the “tefillin,” the small box Jewish believers fasten on their foreheads in prayer. The figure of a festival in which a mikoshi is carried in procession is said to call to mind the scene of the Jewish people carrying the Ark of the Covenant. Some argue that even the festival chant-words of Japanese, such as “Yāren, Sōran,” and even the lyrics of the Kimigayo, make sense as Hebrew. The manner of purifying the hands and rinsing the mouth at a shrine. The custom of purifying with salt. These too are said to connect with Jewish purification rites. Taking each one up, there are not a few that make one murmur, “Indeed.” Are all these many correspondences coincidence? — The feeling of wanting to ask so is well understood. It is precisely for this reason that this theory has continued to capture people’s hearts for over a hundred years.

However, here it must be made clear. The Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory is, in the present academic world, treated as a popular fallacy — a kind of so-called “preposterous theory” (tondemo-setsu). The advocate McLeod himself is also evaluated as having been a careless figure who linked anything and everything to the Lost Ten Tribes. Neither linguistically nor genetically has firm evidence been found to support the claim that the Japanese and the ancient Jews share the same ancestors. The numerous “correspondences,” too, on cool verification, are many of them coincidental matches or forced connections. This is a conclusion that ought to be set down honestly.

But — even so, this theory, for some reason, never ceases to draw people in.

Why is that? For one thing, because this theory resonates all too well with the fundamental thought of Hifuri Jingū we have seen until now. The source is one. The humanity of the world was born from a single place and scattered to the world. The Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory comes to look, as it were, like the “demonstration volume” of that grand story. Japan and Judaism. The eastern end of the earth, and the Middle East. If these two peoples, so far apart, truly divided from a single source — then the story of the goshikijin would not be mere myth, but actual history. The mask of Moses and the Orb of Water are its immovable proof — so it goes.

And there is one more correspondence that cannot be overlooked. Please recall. The classification of the goshikijin we saw in Chapter Four. Who were the red people? — They were spoken of as Jews, Native Americans, Arabs, and the like. That is, within the story of the goshikijin, the red people were a color originally bound to Judaism. It is precisely for this reason that the “red mask” of the goshikijin masks being made the “mask of Moses” is by no means abrupt. Red = Jew = Moses. This linkage was built into the system of the goshikijin from the very beginning. Recalling further, those red people were also the color said to have vanished from the ground and slipped into the bottom of the earth. The red people who vanished into underground Agartha, and the Jews who drifted from the Middle East to Japan. Around the same “red,” the thread to the bottom of the earth and the thread to the far side of the globe cross here. Within the small color system of the five colors, the underground empire and ancient Judaism alike are all folded in. At the brilliance of that design, one can only murmur in admiration.

And here, please recall the Takeuchi Monjo of Chapter Five. The Takeuchi Monjo told that the world’s saints, such as Moses and Christ, all came to visit Japan and served the Emperor. The tradition of Hifuri Jingū that Moses came to Japan is, precisely, one manifestation of this worldview of the Takeuchi Monjo. The world’s saints gathered in Japan. The world’s peoples take Japan as their source. Among them was also Moses of Judaism —. The Takeuchi Monjo, the goshikijin, the Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory, the mask of Moses, the Orb of Water. These, while being separate traditions, are firmly bound together by the single thick thought that “Japan is the source of all.”

Having come this far, we notice one thing.

The story surrounding Hifuri Jingū is by no means closed within the frame of Japan. It extends vertically to the bottom of the earth (Agartha), and at the same time extends horizontally to the far side of the globe (Judaism). Upward, downward, sideways. In every direction, it extends its threads. For what this shrine tells is not the “story of Japan,” but the “story of all humanity.” The humanity of the whole world was born here and scattered to the world. If so, then with the story of any people of the world, with the hero of any scripture, this land is connected, and naturally so. Moses, too, and Judaism, too, are but a single thread of that grand story.

To repeat: these are not verified fact. The Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory is held to be a popular fallacy, and neither the mask of Moses nor the Orb of Water is academically grounded historical fact. But in a small shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū, a red mask is quietly called “Moses,” and a transparent stone is handed down as a “Jewish hidden treasure” — that fact itself is certainly there. Whether a story is fact, and the fact that the story has been handed down for over a thousand years, are separate things.

To the bottom of the earth, to the far side of the globe. Our journey, centered on Hifuri Jingū, has extended its threads across the whole world. But having come this far, in everyone’s breast a certain question must surely rise up clearly. — Is this true? Or is it a grand fabrication? Fifteen thousand years, the goshikijin, the Takeuchi Monjo, the underground empire, Moses. How are we to receive these? In the next chapter, we face that question head-on. Dubious, or genuine. Tradition, and scholarship. Let us dare to stand upon that stinging boundary line.

Chapter 10: The Zero Magnetic Field and Mysterious Experiences — The Testimonies of Those Who Visited

In the chapters up to here, we have traced the grand “story” surrounding Hifuri Jingū. The lifeline of fifteen thousand years, the goshikijin, the Takeuchi Monjo, the underground empire, Moses. These were tales within documents and traditions — stories, as it were, “savored with the head.”

But this shrine has yet another face. Something that, beyond reasoning and documents, a person who visits “feels” directly, with the body. In this chapter, we step into that domain of bodily sensation. Toward the many mysterious testimonies that people who have actually visited this land speak of, with one voice.

First, what must be spoken of is the “zero magnetic field.”

Hifuri Jingū stands directly upon a gigantic fault that runs the length of the Japanese archipelago. The Median Tectonic Line. From Kyūshū through Shikoku, piercing the Kii Peninsula and extending to the Kantō region, it is one of Japan’s largest fault zones. Upon this Median Tectonic Line, for some reason, sacred sites of old stand dotted in a line. Ise Jingū, Suwa Taisha, the Bungui Pass — renowned power spots are strung along this single line. And Hifuri Jingū, too, is no exception.

Let us consider this a little. The Median Tectonic Line is a gigantic geological scar that has been carved into the Japanese archipelago from over a hundred million years ago. Upon that line stands Ise Jingū, the apex of Japan’s shrines. There stands Suwa Taisha, a shrine of ancient, ancient faith. The Bungui Pass in Nagano has in recent years been visited by many people seeking healing, as a “sacred site of the zero magnetic field.” Kōyasan in Wakayama, Tenkawa Shrine in Nara, and others are also said to lie near this line. Is this coincidence? Or did the people of antiquity sense, with their bodies, some special power running along this rift in the earth, and so establish those places as sacred sites? Geology, and faith. Two things that seem at first glance to have no relation whatsoever cross strangely upon this single line. The fact that Hifuri Jingū is, at once, the “navel of Kyūshū” and a point upon the sacred line piercing this archipelago lends another depth to this shrine’s specialness.

The surroundings of this Median Tectonic Line are sometimes called a “zero magnetic field.” What is a zero magnetic field? Put simply, it is a special place where the S pole and N pole, two opposing magnetic forces, come into balance and collide, canceling each other out, so that magnetic force does not exist, or becomes extremely unstable. In such places, it is said that the needle of a compass, rather than pointing north, will not settle, wavering and trembling continually. And there is a view that, in such places, the energy of the earth concentrates.

Here there is something I would like to set down honestly. The expression “Hifuri Jingū is a zero magnetic field” is widely circulated, but concerning this, the very chief priest speaks with real candor. “There is no place where the magnetic field becomes completely 0%,” he says. That is, it is not, in the literal sense, a place where magnetic force is completely zero. But at the same time, the chief priest, too, acknowledges that this land’s magnetic field is “special.” Not a complete zero. Yet something is certainly different from an ordinary place. — Is it not, rather, in this honest manner of speaking, not overstating, that one can place trust? Rather than loudly proclaiming with exaggeration, “This is a miraculous zero magnetic field,” he tells it as it is: “Not a complete zero, but special indeed.” That honesty suits this shrine’s bearing well.

Let us set aside, for the moment, what is scientifically rigorous. What matters is rather the fact that many people who have stood in this land “feel” something, not through reasoning.

In the East, there is, from ancient times, the way of thinking called “ki.” Invisible to the eye, yet filling heaven and earth, and flowing in the human body too — the energy of life. Qigong, acupuncture and moxibustion, and feng shui are all founded upon this thought of “ki.” The relatively new words “zero magnetic field” and “power spot,” too, pressed to their root, may be a modern rephrasing of this sense of “ki.” A place has places where ki is full, and places where it stagnates. Stand in a place where ki is good, and mind and body are set in order. — Such a sense is old wisdom that humanity has shared from before science. The “something” people feel at Hifuri Jingū, too, when grasped through this old Eastern concept of “ki,” has a part that falls smoothly into place. In particular, around the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine, two hundred meters down from the main hall. Many people speak of the edge of the Mizutama Pond, where the dragon god sleeps, as being, even within the precinct, especially dense with “ki.” Water, and green, and stillness. Set foot down there, and the air feels, beyond all comparison with before, deep and heavy. Should you actually visit this land, by all means descend not only to the main hall but also to this Higashi-Mitarashi shrine. Between the surface shrine and the inner sanctuary, what can be felt is surely utterly different.

What are the people who visited saying?

Heard most often is the sensation that “the air changes.” The moment one passes through the torii and sets foot on the approach amid the dense stand of cedars, the very quality of the air, they say, plainly changes from before. Cool, and yet, somewhere, warm. Taut, and yet the heart loosens. It cannot be put well into words, but “this place is different” — the skin, the flesh, notices first. Such testimonies are astonishingly many.

Next most common is experience concerning “sound.” The voices of birds, the sound of wind crossing the trees, sound different from usual, as if something special. Or, suddenly, the surroundings fall utterly silent. That stillness is so deep the ears ache. Amid the rustling of the forest, suddenly, some great silence arrives. There are people who say they were present at such a moment.

And the “sensation of returning to the origin.” This is an impressive testimony peculiar to Hifuri Jingū. Standing in this land, one is for some reason wrapped in a deep relief, as if having returned to one’s “very first place,” they say. The reason is unknown. Though it should be one’s first visit, it is intensely nostalgic. As if, long, long ago, one had been here —. That, in this place spoken of as the land of humanity’s origin, the source of all, a person should feel the “sensation of returning to the origin,” seems an over-perfect correspondence, and yet, people who actually feel so are without end.

Among them are people who speak of even more dramatic experiences. The body shuddered. Tears welled up without reason. The palms grew hot and tingling. The core of the head cleared. — Such bodily reactions, seen scientifically, may perhaps be explained as wholly natural physiological responses brought on by suggestion, by expectation, by changes in environment. A quiet, solemn space deep in the forest. If upon it is laid the story of a “fifteen-thousand-year-old sacred site,” it is no wonder that a person’s mind and body are prepared to feel something. But — even if that is so, the “something” that person felt in that moment is, for that person, an unmistakably genuine experience.

“Only those who are called can reach it.”

This saying, touched on in the prologue as well, is also spoken of repeatedly as an experiential account. One meant to go, yet lost the way. Plans, for some reason, fell through. Conversely, with no plans at all, strange ties accumulated, and before one knew it, one was standing before the shrine. — Such testimonies concerning “ties,” come to think of it, may be an accumulation of coincidences that could happen at any place. People tend to remember, about impressive places, the events before and after as a special story. Even so, a place where so many people similarly feel “called,” “invited,” is not so common.

And this sensation of being “called” seems not to belong to the Japanese alone. To the goshiki-shinsai festival, held once every five years, people gather from overseas too. Among them, it is handed down, there have been times when people of distinguished family lines of the world — a figure said to be a descendant of the Mughal Empire, a person carrying the blood of French high nobility, and the like — attended from afar. People differing in skin color, in language, in culture, in the religion they believe, for some reason gather, as if drawn, to this small shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū. People living on the opposite side of the globe visit this festival, which prays for the harmony of the goshikijin, feeling their own “origin” in it. — That may be, precisely, the moment when the story this shrine has told, the thought that “the humanity of the world divided from a single source,” appears before one’s eyes as an actual scene. Before the goshikijin masks gather, literally, “people of five colors.” The story is calling reality to itself.

How to receive these experiences. That, surely, is for each person.

Seen scientifically, there is no firm evidence that a zero magnetic field exerts any influence on the human body. Many experiential accounts may be explained by suggestion, by preconception, by natural physiological responses. That is, as a cool-headed attitude, correct.

But another view, too, can be taken. The human body may, more than we think, be a sensitive sensor. Before reasoning can explain it, it feels something. Before logical thought can catch up, the skin, the flesh, the cells perceive the “presence” of that place. The people of antiquity must have been far more sensitive to this sense than we are now. They felt, not by reasoning but with the body, “this is a special place,” and built a shrine there. That sacred sites stand in a line upon the Median Tectonic Line may, perhaps, be the crystallization of the keen bodily sense of the people of antiquity.

That a person who visits Hifuri Jingū “feels” something — is it because of suggestion? Or is there truly “something” in this land?

To that question, one probably cannot affix black or white. And there may be no need to force black or white upon it. What is certain is that many people who have stood here return having touched something, each in their own way. Whether that “something” is the energy of the earth, the presence of the gods of antiquity, or something that was in the depths of one’s own heart — that, only the one who visited knows.

And here, there seems to be one important meaning for us who live in the present age. We, ordinarily, live amid all too much information, and stimulus, and busyness. We gaze at the smartphone screen all day, are chased by numbers, are required to be efficient. Amid such days, we may, before we know it, have dulled our power to “feel.” We have become unable to perceive the difference in the quality of air, the sound of wind, the depth of stillness. It is precisely for this reason that there may be meaning in placing oneself in a place like Hifuri Jingū, simply standing, simply breathing, and trying to “feel” something. Whether or not that can be scientifically proven is, in this case, secondary. To open, once more, the dulled senses. To recover the forgotten power to perceive the world. It may be precisely in that “opened” state that a person sees what is usually unseen, and hears voices that cannot be heard. If Hifuri Jingū is “calling,” it may also be said that it is awakening the senses that have slept within us.

Now. Up to here, we have traced the grand story surrounding Hifuri Jingū, and the vivid experiential accounts of those who visited. Fifteen thousand years, the goshikijin, the underground empire, Moses, and the zero magnetic field.

But having read on this far, in your breast a certain question has, all the while, perhaps continued to smolder.

— Is this true?

In the next chapter, we no longer avert our eyes from that question. Dubious, or genuine. Tradition, and scholarship. Believing, and doubting. Let us dare to stand upon that stinging boundary line, and look anew at the true meaning of this shrine’s existence.

Chapter 11: Dubious, or Genuine — Between Tradition and Scholarship

Now, at last, the time has come to face this question.

Up to here, we have traced the dazzling story surrounding Hifuri Jingū. A sacred tree with a lifeline of fifteen thousand years. Goshikijin masks enshrining the ancestral gods of all the world’s humanity. The Takeuchi Monjo, said to be older than the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. The red and blue peoples, said to have vanished from the ground and slipped into the bottom of the earth. The underground empires Agartha and Shambhala. The mask of Moses and the Jewish hidden treasure, handed down in the mountains of Kyūshū. And the many mysterious experiences spoken of by those who visited.

It is grand. So grand it is almost dizzying. And in your breast, having read on this far, one question must, all the while, continue to smolder without going out.

— Is this true? Or is it a grand fabrication?

In this chapter, we no longer flee from that question. Dubious, or genuine. To be believed, or to be doubted. Let us dare to stand upon that stinging boundary line.

First, let us honestly and clearly confirm the view “from the side of scholarship.” In the preceding chapters, too, we drew the line each time, but here let us once more sum it up.

The Takeuchi Monjo is, academically, held to be a “forged document” created in the modern age. This is very nearly an established view. To the lineage of a fifteen-thousand-year history, there is no scientific or archaeological grounding. The sacred tree’s fifteen-thousand-year lifeline, too, can be confirmed from the current tree’s growth rings for only two thousand years’ worth. There is also no evidence that the story of the goshikijin tells of the actual origin of humanity. The Hollow Earth theory is completely denied by modern science. Agartha and Shambhala alike are tradition, and myth. The Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry Theory is held to be a popular fallacy, lacking grounding both linguistically and genetically. The special effect of a zero magnetic field upon the human body, too, is not scientifically demonstrated. And the chief priest himself acknowledges that “there is no place where the magnetic field is completely 0%.”

— Lined up this far, it does look rather as if there is nothing to say in reply. Seen with a cool, scientific eye, the part of the grand story surrounding Hifuri Jingū that stands as “historical fact” is, for the most part, either denied or lacking grounding. This is an honest conclusion from which one must not avert the eyes.

However, for the sake of fairness, let me also say this. Nor has scholarship explained everything exhaustively. For instance, why are Japan’s oni precisely the two colors, red and blue, that vanished from the goshikijin? Why do so many old sacred sites stand in a line upon the geological rift of the Median Tectonic Line? Why did a specialist in Jewish history point, without wavering, to the red of the goshikijin masks as Moses? Why do people across the world repeatedly dream the same dream of a paradise at the bottom of the earth? Each one alone may perhaps be explained by coincidence, by forced connection, by suggestion. But in the way they overlap many times over and converge into a single story, “something” that cannot be settled by reason alone certainly remains. Science denied much. But it cannot be said to have “unraveled every mystery.” What was denied is the “claim as historical fact”; the “awe” that these correspondences call up in the human heart, even science cannot deny.

Then — are these all “lies,” and “meaningless”?

Here, let us stop and consider. I do not think so.

For the question “is it correct as historical fact” and the question “does it have value, does it have meaning” are entirely separate questions. These two must not be confused.

Consider, for instance, the myths of the world. The birth of the land by Izanagi and Izanami in Japanese myth. The story of the gods in Greek myth. The creation of heaven and earth in the Bible. Are these “historical fact”? No. As literal fact, no god gave birth to islands, nor was the world created in seven days. But who would cast aside these myths as “meaningless because they are lies”? Myth is not fact. But it is an irreplaceable vessel of “truth” that humanity has spun over thousands of years, telling of the meaning of the world, of how a person should live, of the relation with the cosmos. Not fact, yet true. — It is precisely within this seemingly contradictory phrasing that the essence of myth lies.

The mythologists of the twentieth century thought thus. Myth is not the immature “mistaken science” of primitive people. It is another language by which the human being understands and takes on the meaning of his own existence, the formation of the world, the mystery of life and death. Whereas science asks “how the world works (how),” myth asks “why the world exists, why we live (why).” These two are not things that compete. Their roles differ. One cannot measure the beauty of a star with a microscope, nor the depth of love with a telescope. In the same way, trying to measure the truth of myth with the measuring stick of science is, from the start, a mistaken use of the tool. The point that “the Takeuchi Monjo is scientifically a forgery” is correct. But that correctness is also as beside the point as saying, “this painting provides no nutrition.” A painting is not a thing for eating. Myth, too, is not a thing for providing scientific fact.

The story surrounding Hifuri Jingū, too, lies precisely on this same horizon.

Fifteen thousand years. The goshikijin. The Takeuchi Monjo. The underground empire. These are, as historical fact, unproven. But the “truth” they seek to tell — the humanity of the world was originally one. Therefore, beyond differences of skin color and people, recognize one another, and be in harmony. — How about this message itself? Is this a lie? Is it meaningless? Rather, is it not a deep truth urgently needed precisely in the present world, where strife never ceases?

Here there is a paradox. The paradox that precisely because the story is not “fact,” the “prayer” enfolded within it rises up in a pure form. If the goshikijin were verifiable historical fact, it would become a mere “event of the past.” But precisely because it is myth, and story, it continues to be a “calling” to us who live in the now, beyond the ages. Fact belongs to the past. But myth belongs to the eternal present.

Come to think of it, the history of humanity is also a history in which such “stories that are not fact” have moved reality. People believed in myth and built gigantic temples. They believed in the words of scripture and set out on far pilgrimages. They believed in stories of founding and nurtured a sense of belonging to the nation. Whether those stories were literal fact is not the essential problem. That people believed them, were moved by those stories, and built up actual cultures and societies — that fact itself is weighty. Stories have the power to remake reality. Even if that story was a “made thing” — no, rather, precisely because it was a “made thing” — within it are crystallized the unmistakable wishes and passion of the people who made it, believed it, and handed it down. The Takeuchi Monjo, too, and the goshikijin, too, in that sense, can be said to be a cultural heritage in which the grand “dream” of modern Japanese is crystallized. To call a dream a lie is easy. But when we ask why that dream was dreamed, and what that dream brought to people, we come to touch a human truth that can never be seen through the verification of fact alone.

And there is one more thing I would like to consider. The true nature of the “dubiousness” of what is held to be “dubious.”

The Takeuchi Monjo is held to be a forgery because it was created in the modern age, because its provenance is uncertain, because it contradicts existing history. But what is interesting here is the question of why modern Japanese came to “make” such a story. Why did they want to tell that the humanity of the world was once one, that Japan was its source? Projected there are the urgent feelings of people who lived through the turbulent age of the modern era. The pride of trying to stand on equal footing with the world. The anxiety of being swept away by Western civilization. The wish to position one’s own roots at the center of the world. A forged document is, while being a lie, at the same time an honest mirror reflecting the hearts of the people of that age. So to cast it aside as “a forgery” and be done is a shame. When we ask why it was born, and what people sought in handing it down, the forged document begins to tell us a different kind of “truth.”

Besides, there is something that must not be forgotten. Even if scholarship judges it “not fact,” the shrine that is Hifuri Jingū actually exists there, and once every five years the goshikijin masks are opened, people gather from across the world, and pray for harmony — this scene is an unmistakable “fact.” Whatever the truth or falsehood of the story, the doings of the people who believe that story and pray before it certainly exist. And that prayer moves the hearts of those who visit, makes them feel something, and even, at times, changes how they live. If so, then is that story not, for that person, more “genuine” than any historical fact?

Dubious, or genuine. — Probably, the very way of setting up this question is mistaken.

The story of Hifuri Jingū is not genuine in the sense of “a fact such as would be set down in a history textbook.” But in the sense of “a myth that moves the human heart, changes how one sees the world, and illuminates the meaning of living,” it is unmistakably genuine. What should be asked is not “fact, or lie.” It is rather “what is this story calling out to us,” “what meaning does it hold for us who live in the now” — that side.

Lastly, it may be all right to say this. When we visit Hifuri Jingū, we can take either of two attitudes. One is the attitude of taking everything at face value and immersing oneself wholly in the mystery of fifteen thousand years. The other is the attitude of taking a cool distance and observing this as an interesting cultural phenomenon. But the richest is, probably, to hold both at the same time. While knowing “this may not be fact,” to have one’s heart tremble nonetheless at the beauty of that story. To believe while doubting. To immerse oneself while keeping distance. — It is precisely upon that suspended, stinging boundary line that the true savor of this shrine lies.

This attitude of “believing while doubting” is by no means a careless, noncommittal attitude. Rather, I think this is a mature, intellectual attitude. To swallow anything and everything whole is perilous. But to cast aside anything and everything as “unscientific” is, in its own way, impoverished. In the world there are things that can be settled by science, and things that cannot. To be able, before what cannot be settled, not to issue a hasty answer, but to remain awhile within that “not-knowing.” To be able to savor a mystery as a mystery. Is that not one rich capacity that we moderns are apt to forget? Hifuri Jingū reminds us of that capacity. Here, neither showing off one’s knowledge and laughing “this is a fabrication,” nor, conversely, blindly believing everything and losing oneself, suits the place. One simply stands there, quietly, with awe. One receives what cannot be known, as something that cannot be known. That very humility may be the attitude most fitting to a place that is a sacred site.

Science, and myth. Fact, and truth. Doubt, and faith. Hifuri Jingū stands between both, and does not tell us to choose one or the other. It only, quietly, asks. How do you feel?

Now, the long journey, too, draws near its end. For us, who have traced a grand story and gazed between dubiousness and genuineness, only one question remains. — Then, to actually visit this land, what should one do? In the next chapter, returning at last to reality, let us guide the way of reaching, and the way of touring, this navel of Kyūshū.

Chapter 12: A Guide to Worship — How to Reach It, and How to Tour It

We have shared a long journey of story together. From the fifteen-thousand-year-old sacred tree, to the goshikijin, the Takeuchi Monjo, the underground empire, Moses, and the question “dubious, or genuine.” Within our heads, we have journeyed quite far.

But however grand a story, it begins, in the end, with a single step in reality. To actually stand, on one’s own feet, at this navel of Kyūshū. In this final chapter, returning from the dazzling story to reality, we guide the way of reaching, and the way of touring, Hifuri Jingū. This is a chapter for practice, for turning a journey of the head into a journey of the body.

First, the place.

Hifuri Jingū is enshrined at Ōno, Yamato-chō, Kamimashiki-gun, Kumamoto Prefecture. South of the outer rim of Aso, in a deep mountain hollow close to the prefectural border with Miyazaki. It is at very nearly the center of Kyūshū, the position called the “navel of Kyūshū.”

To reach it, a car is most realistic. From the Kumamoto city area it is roughly a hundred minutes; the scenic Tsūjun Bridge is about thirty minutes away, and the village of myth, Takachiho Gorge, about forty minutes. Basically, one follows National Route 218. This road is relatively easy to drive, but as one nears the shrine, the curves of the mountain road begin to continue. Keep the speed modest. Especially for a first visit, driving in daylight hours is strongly recommended. In winter, the road surface may freeze in the morning cold, so it is reassuring to have studless tires or chains prepared. And as touched on in the prologue, the entrance to this shrine, if one is not attentive, is easy to miss. A large torii of plain white wood, standing along the national route. That is the landmark. Relying on your car navigation or map app, take care not to overlook that torii.

Let us give the rough guidelines from the main departure points. From the air gateway, Aso-Kumamoto Airport, it is about an hour and a half by car. From the Mifune Interchange of the Kyūshū Expressway, by way of National Routes 445 and 218, one should likewise allow over an hour. When heading south by expressway from the Fukuoka direction as well, one passes through Kumamoto and enters the mountain road. In any case, what can be said in common is that “the final mountain-road section takes time.” After getting off the expressway, it is long. It is wise to estimate with more margin than the time displayed by the map app. For the destination setting of your car navigation, searching by address (Ōno, Yamato-chō, Kamimashiki-gun, Kumamoto Prefecture) or by phone number is sure. In the mountains, the smartphone signal may become unstable. Confirming the route in advance will let you drive with ease.

It is not impossible to head there by public transportation, either. But to speak honestly, considerable resolve is required. Express buses run from the Kumamoto city area, Aso-Kumamoto Airport, and the Takamori direction, but their frequency is about one round trip a day. There is also guidance to alight at “Mamihara” and walk about forty minutes from there. Alternatively, board a bus “bound for Mamihara” from the Kumamoto bus terminal and alight at the “Ōno Heitate-gū-mae” bus stop. In any case, allow around two hours for the trip. As the number of services is few, be sure to check the timetable in advance. A plan with margin, including transfers and walking, is indispensable. — But, depending on how one thinks of it, this “difficulty of reaching” is itself the very character of Hifuri Jingū. One cannot go easily. It is precisely for that reason that the emotion on reaching it is all the deeper. If one thinks of it as going to confirm, on one’s own feet, the saying that “only those who are called can go,” even that long road becomes a part of the pilgrimage.

The parking lot is maintained free of charge. The entrance is near the torii along National Route 218. There is a first parking lot and a second parking lot, and on an ordinary Sunday or holiday, one can usually park without trouble. However, there are days to be careful of. The first three days of the New Year, and August 23, when the goshiki-shinsai festival is held. On these days, it often fills up from early morning. On days when congestion is expected, aim to arrive early. As roadside parking on a mountain road is dangerous, avoid it absolutely.

Now, at last, worship.

Pass through the plain white-wood torii along the national route, and beyond it, a long stone-step approach continues. This stone-step approach is, precisely, the first sight to see of Hifuri Jingū. Many worshippers say they are struck, more than by the shrine building itself, by the atmosphere of this approach. On both sides, moss-clad guardian dogs (komainu) quietly watch over worshippers. A dense grove. Sunlight filtering through the leaves, settling upon the stone steps. With each step climbed, one after another, the sensation of pressing in from the secular world into the sanctuary. Here, please climb slowly, without hurrying.

Climb the stone steps to the top, and the main hall appears. The shrine building is by no means large. Nor is it dazzling. Rather, it is a calm and modest design. But seen with eyes that know the story up to now, one cannot help but think that in the depths of this modest shrine building, the god of the cosmos itself, Ōtonochi-Ōkami, is enshrined, and the goshikijin masks sleep. The cosmos is contained within a small vessel. Holding the greatness of that disproportion in one’s breast, one wishes to press one’s palms together quietly.

The time required for worship, if the main hall alone, is plenty within thirty minutes. But that would be to have savored only half of Hifuri Jingū. If one descends properly to the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine and spends time at the edge of the Mizutama Pond, allow an hour to an hour and a half for the round trip and stay. Further, if one draws the sacred water, receives the goshuin (shrine seal), and savors the atmosphere of the approach slowly, about two hours. One has, after all, come all the way to this “only those who are called can go” sacred site. Rather than hurriedly passing through, please take ample time. This place is far too precious to “consume” in haste.

And — to go home here would be a shame. The true essence of Hifuri Jingū lies beyond the main hall.

Facing the main hall, turn to the left, around to the west side, and there is another torii descending into the forest. Beyond it is the descending mountain path that continues to the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine. It is the sanctuary of the Mizutama Pond, where the dragon god sleeps, touched on in detail in Chapter Seven. One descends a steep, narrow mountain path of about two hundred meters. As the path is apt to turn to mud and is a proper mountain trail, the equipment on one’s feet matters. In heels, or brand-new leather shoes, it is all but impossible.

Here I would like to touch on clothing and what to bring. To truly savor Hifuri Jingū, easy-to-walk-in shoes are essential. Sneakers or trekking shoes are desirable. On rainy days, and after, it turns to mud especially, so slip-resistant shoes. In summer, as it is a mountain hollow, insect repellent makes it comfortable. In winter, as it grows cold, gloves and a neck warmer are good. Light rainwear, too — as mountain weather changes easily, one is reassured to have a piece. And if one is to receive the sacred water, an empty plastic bottle. However, as touched on in Chapter Seven, draw about one bottle per person. Not hoarding the dragon god’s blessing is the proper manner.

Once you have descended to the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine, please linger awhile at the edge of the Mizutama Pond. You should be able to feel air plainly different from around the main hall — deep, and dense. The pond where the Eight Great Dragon Kings sleep. The two sacred waters, differing in taste from left to right. Only those who have descended this far can meet the other face of Hifuri Jingū.

For a memento of worship, there is the goshuin. The goshuin of Hifuri Jingū will become a memorable one, as proof of having visited this sacred site. You can receive it at the offering office.

Here I would like to touch a little on the etiquette of worship. As we have seen, Hifuri Jingū is no mere tourist site. It is a special sacred site that conveys a lifeline of fifteen thousand years and prays for the harmony of all the world’s humanity. It is precisely for this reason that, on visiting, one wishes to hold fitting respect and restraint. Before passing through the torii, a light bow. On the approach, avoiding the center (seichū), which is held to be the path of the gods, and walking the edge, is the manner of old. If there is a purification font, cleanse the hands and mouth before heading to the shrine building. And what is most important is to keep the stillness. Making a loud commotion, or romping about, does not suit this place. The sanctuary of the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine is an especially sacred place. Carelessly disturbing the waterside, or leaving trash behind, must absolutely never happen. Please recall that taboo — that violating the pond where the dragon god sleeps brings on a typhoon. It is an admonition from antiquity: do not forget your awe of nature. More beautiful than when you came. Walking quietly, with awe and gratitude. That is the greatest respect to this sacred site.

If you take photographs, there are several sights to see. The great plain-white-wood torii along the national route. The long stone-step approach and the moss-grown guardian dogs. The cedar grove where sunlight filters through. And the mysterious Mizutama Pond of the Higashi-Mitarashi shrine. However, there are also subjects for which photography is not permitted, such as the interior of the main hall and the goshikijin masks. Follow the on-site guidance as to whether photography is allowed, and do not point a lens carelessly at sacred subjects. Incidentally, there are people who say that, after worship, “a mysterious light appeared in the photo.” Whether to see that as a lens flare or as the presence of something — that is up to you.

On the season to visit. The most easy to walk and beautiful are May to June of fresh green, and October to November of autumn leaves. On rainy days especially, and just after, the colors of the moss and of the cedar bark come out deep and dense, and the mysterious atmosphere increases all the more. The refreshing clarity of a sunny day is hard to give up, but a Hifuri Jingū dampened and moist is also exceptional. And if possible, one wishes to visit in the early hours of the morning. With few people, in the stillness, one can slowly savor the “ki” of this sacred site.

If you wish to be present at the goshiki-shinsai festival. The festival is every year on August 23. And once every five years is the grand festival. That grand festival when the goshikijin masks are unveiled and people gather from across the world. As to when the next grand festival is, one wishes to confirm before visiting. If one could be present on that day — of which there is no telling how many times in a lifetime one can attend — it would be an unforgettable experience.

Lastly, a little about the surroundings, too. Hifuri Jingū lies upon a tourist route also called the Myth Highway (Shinwa Kaidō). Nearby is the stone arch bridge designated a National Treasure, the Tsūjun Bridge, and beyond it waits the village of myth, Takachiho. Set Hifuri Jingū at the center of a day, and combine it with such nearby noted spots, and it will become a journey to savor, whole, the deep-mountain world of myth of Kyūshū.

Let me sketch a little plan for touring. For instance, if entering from the Miyazaki side, one wishes first to visit Takachiho Gorge. It is the stage of the myth of the descent of the heavenly grandson, and the deep ravine and emerald-colored water are divine. One comes to trace for oneself the very route by which, as we saw in Chapter One, Takeiwatatsu-no-Mikoto is said to have passed, led by a swan. From Takachiho, cross the mountains along the Gokase River, and in about forty minutes it is Hifuri Jingū. From the village of myth, to the land of humanity’s origin. It is a journey that connects myth, upon the map. Alternatively, if entering from the Kumamoto side, one wishes first to stop at the Tsūjun Bridge. It is a grand stone aqueduct bridge built in the Edo period, and the sight of its water discharge is overwhelming. This bridge that carries water across, and the sacred water of the Mizutama Pond. On the theme of “water,” two noted spots connect loosely. From the Tsūjun Bridge to Hifuri Jingū is about thirty minutes.

As for lodging and meals, because it is a mountain-hollow land, the options are by no means many. Many people tour it as a day trip, but if you wish to savor the stillness of this land’s morning or dusk, a plan of staying at an inn in the Aso direction or in Takachiho, and visiting Hifuri Jingū in the early morning, is also wonderful. Hifuri Jingū in the morning light, with no people about, is exceptional. For meals, roadside stations that command the magnificent scenery of Aso, and shops making the most of local ingredients, are dotted about. To savor the bounty of the land after worship is also one of the pleasures of the journey. The fruits of the mountains; rice raised on pure water. The very taste of this land is, as it were, a gift from the earth.

Now, with this, the preparations are complete. You know the way of reaching it, and the way of touring it. After this, all that remains is for you to pass through that plain white-wood torii, on your own feet.

To you, who have read on this far through the long story. Lastly, at the end of this journey, there is just one thing I would like to convey. On the next, final page, let me tell it, and quietly close this long journey.

Epilogue — Standing at the Navel of the Earth

It was a long journey.

From a small torii hidden in a curve of National Route 218, our journey began. At that time, we meant only to be standing before a hidden shrine. But what continued beyond that torii was a world deep and wide, far beyond imagining.

We looked up at the sacred tree that carves a lifeline of fifteen thousand years, and stood before the goshikijin masks that open only once every five years. We opened the door of the Takeuchi Monjo, said to be older than the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and pressed our palms together before a god that embodies the cosmos itself. From behind the main hall, we descended two hundred meters to the pond where the dragon god sleeps, and in the depths of that water vein, we caught a glimpse of an underground empire said to have been built by the red and blue peoples who vanished from the ground. We marveled that a shrine in the mountains of Kyūshū is bound to the distant Middle East, to the story of Moses and Judaism. And we lent our ears to the mysterious experiences of those who visited, and at the last, faced head-on the question, “Is this true?”

Upward, downward, sideways. Our journey, centered on this single point, extended its threads in every direction. From the god of the cosmos of heaven, to the underground empire at the bottom of the earth. From the myth of Japan, to the Jews on the far side of the globe. So small a single point was connected with so wide a world.

Why does so vast a story gather at this single point?

At the journey’s end, the reason at last comes into view. It is because this land is spoken of as “the source of all.” The humanity of the world was born from a single place, divided into five colors, and scattered to the world. That single point of beginning. If it is the source, then it is connected with every place of the world, and every story, as a matter of course. For the source is the place from which all flows out.

The navel of the earth. The navel of Kyūshū. This single point that falls just at the center upon the map.

The navel is, come to think of it, a strange place. It is the trace of where we were once connected to our mother. Before being born, we were connected, through the umbilical cord, as one with our mother’s life. The navel is the undying proof of having “once been one.”

When Hifuri Jingū is called the “navel of the earth,” a deep meaning dwells there. The humanity of the world was, once, one. People differing in skin color, in language, in culture, now far apart, are, traced back, the divided forms of the same life, born from a single source. To stand at the navel of the earth is to touch that memory of having “once been one.”

The goshikijin. Red, white, yellow, black, blue. Those who scattered upon the ground, those who slipped into the bottom of the earth, those who crossed the sea to distant lands. Though the colors differ, though the places of dwelling differ, traced along, all are one. What this story has sought to hand down for fifteen thousand years was, in the end, that single point. We were one. So do not strive. Recognize one another. Be in harmony.

Whether that is historical fact, one need no longer ask. As we saw in Chapter Eleven, whether it is fact and whether it is true are separate things. Even if the fifteen thousand years cannot be verified. Even if the goshikijin are myth. The truth of that prayer — “we were originally one” — is urgently needed precisely in the world of now. In this age where, over skin color, over people, over faith, strife never ceases.

Having ended the journey, once more we recall that plain white-wood torii.

A small entrance, that one would overlook if not attentive. But beyond it, the cosmos, the underground, the whole history of the world, were folded in. In a small vessel, all was contained. That may, perhaps, resemble each one of us. A small, single human being. But within it, a lifeline of fifteen thousand years — no, all of the history of life, far longer than that, flows in. The single point that is you, too, is connected with the source of all.

When we stand at the navel of the earth, we recall that we are a part of a great whole. We are not alone. We are not an isolated point. We are the divided form of a single great life. If one could carry that sensation home as a souvenir, this journey would hold a sure meaning.

Now, the story closes here.

But the true journey may, perhaps, begin from here. Next, it is your turn to pass through that torii. The navel of Kyūshū, the navel of the earth. At that single point where the time of fifteen thousand years sleeps, please try to stand, on your own feet. And please confirm. Whether there is, truly, “something” there. Or — whether that “something” was, already, within you yourself.

The five colors, toward one.

That prayer, from this quiet mountain shrine, even now, flows out toward the world.