The Breast Rock at Udo Jingu: Where Toyotama-hime Is Still Prayed To

Toyotama-hime is already recorded as worshipped today near the shore in Kagoshima Prefecture; the specific site most associated with living prayer to her sits just across the prefectural border, in Miyazaki. Udo Jingu is built directly into a sea cave on the Nichinan coast, said to be the very birthing hut where Toyotama-hime bore her son Ugayafukiaezu before returning to the sea in shame at having been seen in her true form, exactly as her courtship and birth are already described. The cave has been treated as a place of ocean worship since ancient times, with recorded rebuilding under Emperor Kanmu in 782, though the cave's own use long predates any dated record. Inside the cave stands the feature that makes the shrine's worship concrete rather than merely commemorative: two rounded rock formations, said to be where Toyotama-hime left her own breasts in the cave so her infant son could still be nursed after she had gone, from which water still drips today. Outside the cave sits a separate boulder, Turtle Rock, believed to have carried Toyotama-hime ashore from the sea; visitors throw handmade fortune stones at a marked indentation in it, men with the left hand and women with the right, a custom that only began in the mid twentieth century and whose proceeds support a local school. Both practices draw parents today seeking blessings for safe childbirth and healthy children, tying Toyotama-hime's living veneration directly to the one act her own myth is built around.