Omoikane

Omoikane's part in luring Amaterasu from her cave is not his only documented role in the Kojiki. Donald Philippi's standard scholarly translation identifies Omoikane's genealogy separately from that episode, naming him son of Takamimusubi, a creative deity whose own line runs alongside rather than through Amaterasu's, which places Omoikane within a second strand of the heavenly genealogy distinct from the sun goddess's direct descendants. The Kojiki gives him a further, later role in the Tenson Korin, the divine descent that sends Ninigi to found the imperial line: Omoikane is named among the deities charged with deliberating on and arranging the descent itself, an advisory office consistent with the counsel-giving character the cave episode already establishes for him, applied here to a different and later event in the same chronicle. The Encyclopedia of Shinto, produced by Kokugakuin University's own Shinto studies program, records this pattern as consistent with Omoikane's standing office across the mythology generally, the deity the other kami turn to for a plan whenever one is needed, so his presence at the descent is not an isolated second appearance but the same established role exercised again at a different and later point in the Kojiki's own chronicle.

Omoikane carries a same-figure-other-register edge to Deity 2911, whose own record states him actively venerated in a living tradition, and the concrete present-day form of that standing centers on Chichibu Shrine in Saitama Prefecture, which enshrines him under his fuller title, Yagokoro Omoikane, alongside the region's other tutelary deities. Documented contemporary practice at shrines enshrining Omoikane, including Chichibu, directs prayer specifically toward academic and examination success, a narrowing of his mythic domain of wisdom and counsel into the single most common occasion a modern visitor actually seeks him out for, students praying before school entrance examinations rather than petitioners seeking counsel on a matter of state the way the Kojiki's own gods once did. Helen Hardacre's history of Shinto documents this kind of narrowing, a kami's broad mythic domain surviving into modern practice as one specific, popularly understood specialty, as a general and well attested pattern in how historical Shinto veneration has continued into the present rather than lapsing. Chichibu Shrine's own continued operation as an active site of worship, rather than a preserved historical monument, is itself the plainest evidence that Omoikane's actively venerated status, already attested on his deity-register entry, describes an ongoing present-day practice and not only a documented historical one.