Yamato Takeru

Summary

Yamato Takeru is the most famous hero of Japan's ancient records. He is the son of the emperor Keikō, and his boyhood name was Wo-usu, "Little Mortar". His story is told in two eighth-century books: the Kojiki, "Record of Ancient Matters", compiled in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, "Chronicles of Japan", of 720. The Nihon Shoki says he was born a twin on the same day as his brother, so their father named them after the mortar, Great Mortar and Little Mortar, and that as a child he had a manly spirit and grew up tall and handsome, strong enough to lift a tripod.

The Kojiki tells that his elder brother failed to come to their father's morning and evening meals, so the emperor told Wo-usu to teach him his duty. Five days passed and the brother still did not come; asked about it, Wo-usu said: I caught him at dawn when he went into the privy, crushed him, pulled off his limbs, wrapped them in matting and threw them away. Alarmed at his son's ferocity, the emperor sent him west to kill two Kumaso brothers who would not submit; his hair was still bound at the brow like a boy's. His aunt Yamato-hime, priestess of the shrine at Ise, gave him her robe and skirt, and he went with a sword hidden in his bosom. He found the brothers preparing a feast for a new house guarded by three rows of warriors. On the feast day he combed his hair down like a girl's and put on his aunt's clothes, so that he looked like a young girl, and went in among the women. The brothers were delighted with him and seated him between them; when the feast was at its height he drew the sword and stabbed the elder through the chest, and when the younger fled he caught him at the foot of the steps and thrust him through from behind. The wounded man said: do not move the sword, I have something to say, and asked who he was. He answered: I am the son of the emperor who rules the Land of the Eight Great Islands, and my name is Yamato Woguna, "the boy of Yamato". The wounded man said: in the West there is no one braver than we two, but in great Yamato there is a man braver than we; so I offer you a name: from now on you shall be praised as Yamato Takeru, "the brave of Yamato". As soon as he had said it, the prince ripped him up like a ripe melon.

Then he entered Izumo to kill its brave. He made friends with him, secretly made a sword of oak wood and wore it, and went with him to bathe in the Hi River. Yamato Takeru came out of the water first, girded on the other man's sword and said: let us exchange swords. When the Izumo brave came out he girded on the wooden sword, and Yamato Takeru said: come, let us cross swords. The man could not draw his sword, and Yamato Takeru killed him, then sang a mocking song about the Izumo brave's sword, wound round with creepers and with no true blade.

Then his father sent him east to subdue the savage deities and the unsubmissive people of its twelve roads, and gave him no army. He passed by Ise and wept before his aunt, saying: my father wishes me to die quickly. She gave him the sword Kusanagi and a bag, saying: if you are ever in danger, open the mouth of the bag. In the land of Sagamu its ruler lied to him, saying that in the middle of a moor there was a lagoon where a violent deity lived, and when he went into the moor the ruler set fire to the grass around him. He opened the bag and found a fire-striker inside; he mowed the grass with his sword, struck fire, lit a counter-fire that drove the first fire back, then killed the rulers of that land and burned them, and the place was called Yakizu, "port of burning". When he crossed the sea at Hashirimizu the deity of the crossing raised the waves until the ship could not move, and his wife Oto-tachibana-hime said: I will go into the sea in place of the prince, so that he may finish his task and bring back his report. She spread eight layers of sedge mats, eight of skins and eight of silk on the waves and sat down on them, and the waves fell and the ship went on. As she went down she sang a song recalling her husband standing in the flames on the moor of Sagamu. Seven days later the sea cast her comb on the shore, and the comb was buried in a tomb made for her. Returning from the war with the Emishi tribes, he sat eating at the foot of the Ashigara pass, and the deity of the pass came to him as a white deer; he struck it in the eye with a piece of wild chive and it died. At the top of the pass he sighed three times and said, "Azuma haya!", so the eastern land is called Azuma; the Nihon Shoki says the words mean "alas, my wife!".

He went back to Miyazu-hime in Owari and married her, left Kusanagi with her, and set out for Mount Ibuki meaning to take its deity with his bare hands. On the way a white boar as big as a bull met him, and he said aloud: this is the deity's messenger; I will not kill it now, I will kill it on my way back. The boar was the deity itself, and it sent down a heavy hail that drove him out of his wits, and he only came to himself at a spring at the foot of the mountain. Then his sickness grew worse: his legs became crooked like a rudder, he walked leaning on a staff, his legs swelled as if tied in three places, and each place was named after what befell him there. At a lone pine on Cape Otsu he found a sword he had forgotten there on his way out, and sang to the tree as to a brother: if you were a man I would gird the sword on you and clothe you in my garments. He sang of Yamato, the fairest of lands, hidden behind its green mountains like a fence. His last song was: the sword I left at the maiden's bedside, alas, that sword! Then he died on the moor of Nobo, at thirty years of age, as the Nihon Shoki says.

His wives and children came down from Yamato, built him a tomb, and crawled weeping and singing in the rice fields around it. He came out as a great white bird, rose into the sky and flew towards the shore, and they followed, their feet cut on the stubble of the bamboo grass without feeling the pain, and waded into the sea after him, singing. The Kojiki says these four songs were sung at his burial and are sung to this day at the burial of an emperor. The bird alighted at Shiki in the land of Kawachi, where they built him a tomb called "the Mausoleum of the White Bird", and then it rose to heaven and flew away. The Nihon Shoki says that when the coffin was opened only his clothes were in it, and that the bird alighted in two places where tombs were built, so that he had three.

The idea the story turns on is that the hero's strength is what drives him away. His ferocity frightened his father, who sent him west, and when he came back sent him east without an army, so that he understood his father wished him dead. He wins by craft rather than numbers: a woman's dress at the Kumaso feast, a wooden sword in Izumo, his aunt's bag on the moor. He does not survive alone: his aunt gives him the sword and the bag, and his wife goes into the sea in his place. He perishes when he leaves the sword with a woman and goes up the mountain with empty hands, and speaks aloud and mistakes the deity. The land keeps his story: the places along his road are named after what happened to him there, from the port of burning to Azuma, where he sighed for his wife, to the places where his legs failed him. At the end he goes home as a bird, after singing of his country as he died.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read this hero. The Kojiki writes the name 倭建命, Yamato-takeru no mikoto; we remove no mikoto, an honorific, and two parts remain. The first, Yamato, is the name of the province where the ruling house sat, which later became a name for all Japan; the project's Japanese Semitic essay reads it as Ya-Umato, "people of God", and calls its own reading "very interpretive". The second, takeru, is the name his enemy gave him as he died, meaning in Japanese "the brave, the bold". In Arabic it is dhakar: Lane says that applied to a man dhakar means strong, courageous, acute and ardent, vigorous and effective in affairs; applied to iron it means iron of the toughest and best quality; a dhakar sword is one whose edge is of steel; and one says "the dhukra of the sword and the dhukra of the man are gone", meaning their sharpness. From the same root comes dhikr, fame and renown. Dh becomes t because Japanese has no dh, k is k, and r is r. On this reading Takeru is the dhakar man with the dhakar sword, which is what the story makes him: a brave praised by a name his enemy gave him, carrying Kusanagi, whose father kept his fame alive with a corporation he named "the Takeru".

Linguistic Root

Forms

Dhakar and the nucleus dh-k

Japanese has two words from one stem: take, an epithet in Susanoo's full name, which the Kokugakuin commentators explain as "brave and fierce", and takeru, a name for a man known for his courage, which the Kojiki gives to the two Kumaso brothers and to the brave of Izumo, and which Chamberlain renders "bravo". Old Japanese also has the verb takyebu, "to be fierce". So the Japanese base is take-, and the r of takeru is added to it.

The Juthoor method looks at the full root and its nucleus together. In Arabic the nucleus dh-k joins sharpness and blazing: in Lane dhakat al-nār is "the fire blazed, or burned fiercely", and dhakāʾ is "sharpness, or acuteness, of mind, with quickness of perception". That is the sense of take: fierceness and force. The full root dh-k-r adds the r: the dhakar man is strong, courageous, acute and ardent; dhakar iron is "of the toughest and best quality"; a dhakar sword has an edge of steel; and "the dhukra of the sword and of the man" is their sharpness. Then dhikr: fame, renown, eminence, as in the verse "and We raised high your dhikr". The three letters hold what the hero's name holds: a brave man, a sharp sword and a name that is remembered.

The correspondence runs like this: dh becomes t, since Japanese has no sound between the teeth, and the Juthoor table puts ṭ, t, dh and ẓ in one group when they pass into a tongue that does not keep them apart; k is k; r is the Japanese r. The weak point was that the r of takeru may be the ending of the Japanese verb takeru, "to rage". But the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese has no such verb in the texts of the eighth century: it has the adjective takye, "manly", the verb takyebu, "to be fierce", and takyeru only as a name. In the Kojiki the name is a title that is given: the younger Kumaso brother says as he dies that in the west there is no "brave" man but the two of them, that in Yamato there is a man "braver" than they, "so I give you my name", and the title is written with the single graph 建. So the r is not the ending of a known Old Japanese verb, and it is not in the base take- either; it has no Japanese explanation, and the Arabic reading answers it as the third letter of dh-k-r. This does not prove the correspondence, since the ending may be a Japanese noun-forming element not yet explained.

Yamato and the essay's reading

The Kokugakuin commentators say that Yamato was at first the name of one province, the one later called the province of Yamato, and became a name for all Japan because it was the seat of rule; the Nihon Shoki writes it with the graphs 日本 and glosses them ya-ma-to. The project's Japanese Semitic essay records a reading by some writers that makes the name Ya-Umato, "people of God", in a table of claims about the lost tribes of Israel; it calls the reading "very interpretive" and judges most of that table weak. The old form ya-ma-to has no u between ya and ma, so the reading needs a vowel the word does not have.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Nihon Shoki version

The Nihon Shoki differs from the Kojiki in many places. The hero does not kill his brother; instead the elder brother, asked to go east, is afraid and hides in the grass. In the West there are not two brothers but one chief, Torishi-kaya, "the Brave of Kawakami", who gets drunk at his feast and is stabbed, and gives the name before he dies. When the hero reaches the Emishi of the east they throw away their bows and say: we see in your face something more than human; are you a deity? He answers: I am the son of a deity in human form. He loses his way in the mountains of Shinano after killing the white deer, and a white dog comes and guides him. The deity of Mount Ibuki meets him as a great serpent, not a boar, and he steps over it. Before he dies he sends his father a message saying he has subdued the rebels and hoped to see him again, and the emperor weeps and can taste no food. In this version the sword on the moor moves by itself and mows the grass, as told on the Kusanagi page.

Songs and names

The Kojiki keeps many songs from this story: the mocking song about the Izumo sword, Oto-tachibana-hime's song in the sea, the exchange of verses with the old fire-keeper at the palace of Sakaori, the songs of longing for Yamato, and the four burial songs it says are sung at the burial of emperors. It ties place names to what befell the hero: Yakizu from the burning, Azuma from his sigh for his wife, Tagi from his crooked legs, and Mie, "threefold", from the swelling of his legs in three places.

Symbolic Reading

The Japanese essays do not read Yamato Takeru, but the essay rereading the Japanese myths reads his sword: it makes the finding of Kusanagi in the serpent's tail a picture of extracting iron sand from the bed of the Hi River in Izumo, the sand from which Japanese steel was made. That is its reading of the sword.

In the story itself the hero kills the brave of Izumo while they bathe in that same river, with a true sword against a wooden one. The story ties him to a sword everywhere: he hides one in his bosom at the Kumaso feast, swaps swords in Izumo, mows the grass with Kusanagi, dies after leaving it with a woman, and sings of it in his last song.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest story to the Kumaso feast is that of Thor in Þrymskviða: the giant Þrymr steals his hammer, Thor puts on the bride's clothes and enters the giants' feast as a woman, then takes the hammer and kills Þrymr and his kin. In both stories the hero goes into the feast disguised as a woman and kills his host at his own celebration. Among the Greeks, Thetis hid her son Achilles in a girl's clothes at the court of Lycomedes, but there the disguise was to keep him from the war, not to kill.

Yamato Takeru resembles Heracles in the labours a king who does not love him sends him on, and in his death. Heracles dies on a pyre on Mount Oeta, and when his companions came to gather his bones they found not a single bone, and supposed he had passed from men to the gods, and raised a mound of earth for him. Yamato Takeru's coffin is opened and holds only his clothes; he flies to heaven as a bird, and three tombs are built for him.

Oto-tachibana-hime goes into the sea so that the waves fall and her husband's ship can go on, as Iphigenia was offered at Aulis so that the winds would let the Greek fleet sail; in the Japanese story it is the wife herself who offers to go down.

His tricks, the woman's dress and the wooden sword, are forms of the trickster's work, and the land he subdues and whose places he names belongs to the culture heroes.