Sukunabikona

The same Kojiki that records Okuninushi's court failing to name the tiny stranger, already told through Kuebiko's identification of him, also records how that stranger eventually left. Sukunabikona and Okuninushi had been building and ordering the land together, healing and teaching agriculture, but the work was still unfinished when Sukunabikona chose to go. He is said to have climbed a stalk of millet growing at Cape Miho in Izumo; the slender stalk bent under even his famously small weight and then sprang back, flinging him across the sea to Tokoyo no Kuni, the eternal land beyond the visible world, and he never returned. Okuninushi is left in the text lamenting how he will ever finish the work of building the land alone, a grief the Kojiki treats as the direct cause of his search for a new divine partner. The image is deliberately small in scale, matching everything else told about Sukunabikona: no grand chariot or storm carries him off, only a bent stalk of the humblest cultivated grain, propelled by nothing more than his own negligible weight. It is the same scale of humor and reversal that runs through his identification by Kuebiko, the immobile scarecrow who alone knows what every mobile god could not, and it leaves Sukunabikona's exit from the narrative as unresolved as his entrance into it: a departure to a realm the Kojiki names but never describes, with no promise and no record of any return.

Sukunabikona's standing as actively venerated in a living tradition takes a specific, occupational form. Sukunahikona Shrine sits in Doshomachi, the historic pharmaceutical wholesalers' district of Osaka, a neighborhood that has traded in medicine since the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate gave its merchants the privilege of inspecting and pricing every medicine sold nationwide, imported or domestic. The shrine, established in the ninth century, enshrines Sukunabikona alongside Shinno, the Chinese god of medicine, pairing Japan's own medicine kami with the tradition his role as healer and teacher of remedies already connects him to. The shrine's standing is renewed every year rather than left as history. Its annual Shinnosai festival, held on the fixed dates of November 22 and 23, closes out Osaka's calendar of yearly festivals; worshippers crowd Doshomachi Street among food stalls and lantern displays seeking papier mache tiger charms called shinko, amulets for warding off illness and securing good health, a tradition rooted in the historical use of tiger bone in Japanese and Chinese medicine. The festival's own name for itself, the concluding festival of the year, marks Sukunabikona's cult as neither dormant nor merely commemorative but as the still functioning ritual center of a real medicine trading district.