Izumo Taisha part One

A long, long time ago, this area used to be called Izumo, and was very important. It is a mystical place with lots of gods and monsters, and also it is probably where the first yamato people came over from Korea before spreading out over all of Japan and basically replacing or intermarrying with the people that were already here. But that part seems to be less important than the gods and possibly even the soba.
Being such an important and ancient area, the actual city of Izumo (not here, specifically, which would have just been part of the Izumo province) is blessed with a big shrine, called appropriately, Izumo Taisha, or Izumo Big shrine. It is a big tourist attraction here, and the god that is supposedly housed there, Ookuninushi-no-mikoto (大国主命), is the shinto god of marriage, so people head up there to get luck for their marriages, I hear. Here he is, playing with a wave:



And this is him with a rabbit:



I don't really know what the wave this is all about, but there's a story to the rabbit. You see, once there was a rabbit, the Japanese word for which is usagi, 兎, who was out on an island in the sea of Japan (I think it was one of the Oki Islands here in Shimane, but I don't know for sure), who wanted to come into mainland Japan, but, being a rabbit, couldn't very well get there on his own. So, he tricked some sharks into acting as a bridge for him. I'm not sure how he did this because it wasn't explained to me when I heard the story. Anyway, the sharks figured out his little trick and tried to eat him. He got away, but was hurt by the time he got into what is now Tottori prefecture (just east of here). He happened upon Ookuninushi-no-mikoto's brothers (eighty of them!) who all wanted to marry the princess Yakami, and asked them for some help.

The brothers told him to wash his wounds in the sea and dry them in the wind, which he did, but it hurt a lot, which the brothers knew it would but did anyway because they are the villains of this story. We can hardly fault the sharks for wanting to eat, I figure. Anyway, along came Ookuninushi-n-mikoto (the -no-mikoto part just tells you that his is a god, which he actually wasn't at this point in the story), who actually did help the rabbit by telling him to wash himself in fresh water and roll in the pollen of the cattail plants, which acts as medicine. So, that is why the rabbit statue is there.

There's more to the story of Ookuninushi-no-mikoto and how he came to rule the Izumo province, but I don't know it off the top of my head and you can just find it on Wikipedia if you really want.

I have more pictures from my recent trip to Izumo Taisha, but apparently blogger and Japanese computers don't get along very well, so I can't move the pictures around within the text, so adding them right now is a bit inconvenient. Mata ne!