Yamata no Orochi

What is Yamata no Orochi?

Yamata no Orochi (八岐大蛇) is the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent that the storm god Susanoo kills in Izumo, in what is now Shimane Prefecture. The story is told in Japan's two oldest chronicles, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720). Thrown out of heaven, Susanoo comes down beside the Hi River and finds an old couple weeping. The serpent has eaten seven of their eight daughters, one each year, and is about to come for the last, Kushinada-hime. Susanoo turns the girl into a comb, sets out vats of strong sake, waits until every head is drunk and asleep, and cuts the serpent to pieces. Inside its tail he finds a sword. The full story is retold on our page Yamata no Orochi: Susanoo and the Serpent.

This article is about the creature itself: how the chronicles describe it, where their versions differ, the sword that came out of it, and what scholars have made of it.

The serpent in the chronicles

The Kojiki gives the fullest picture, in the words of the old father. In Basil Hall Chamberlain's translation of 1882, its eyes are like akakagachi, which the text glosses as the plant now called hōzuki, the red Chinese lantern. It has one body with eight heads and eight tails. Moss grows on it, with cypress and cedar trees. Its length stretches over eight valleys and eight hills, and its belly is always bloody and inflamed. The Kojiki writes the name with characters used only for their sound, 八俣遠呂智, as the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten shows. Japanese dictionaries now head the entry with the writing 八岐大蛇.

The Kojiki also calls it "the eight-forked serpent of Koshi". Chamberlain notes that Koshi was long a vague name for the provinces along the Sea of Japan coast from Echizen to Echigo, and that its meaning here is unclear. Heibonsha's MyPedia reads it simply: the serpent came to Izumo every year from the land of Koshi.

The meaning of the name itself is debated. Yamata means "eight-forked". For orochi, Heibonsha's Sekai Daihyakka Jiten points out that the final chi is an old word for spiritual power, as in ikazuchi, "thunder". It argues that the serpent was at root a dragon god that ruled water. The Nipponica encyclopedia glosses the name as roughly "the spirit with eight tails" (a rough translation).

The Nihon Shoki's main text tells much the same story more briefly. In W. G. Aston's translation of 1896, the serpent's eyes are red "like the winter-cherry", firs and cypresses grow on its back, and as it crawls it spreads over eight hills and eight valleys. The sake is set out in eight "cupboards" rather than at eight gates.

Variant versions in the Nihon Shoki

The Nihon Shoki also records several "one writing says" variants, and these change the creature in interesting ways.

• In one, Susanoo comes down not in Izumo but at the River Ye in Aki, in western Honshū. The serpent eats each newborn child of a pregnant goddess. Susanoo greets it politely as "an Awful Deity" and pours a jar of sake into each of its mouths.
• In another, the parents insist that he kill the serpent before he may marry their daughter. Here the serpent has rock-firs growing on each of its heads and a mountain on each side. Susanoo makes it drink poisoned sake.
• In a third, the creature is simply "a serpent which devoured men" at Mount Tori-kami by the upper Hi River. Susanoo has arrived there by way of Silla, in Korea, in a boat made of clay.

The variants also name the sword that did the killing. One says it is now at Isonokami. Another says it is kept by the shrine community of Kibi. The Kojiki simply calls it a "ten-grasp sword".

The sword in the tail

Every version ends with a second sword found inside the serpent's tail. In the Kojiki, Susanoo's own blade breaks on the middle tail. He splits the flesh and finds what Chamberlain translates as "a sharp great sword". The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten notes that the Kojiki calls it Tsumugari no tachi (都牟刈の太刀), while the Nihon Shoki calls it Ame no Murakumo no tsurugi (天叢雲剣), the "Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven". A note in the Nihon Shoki suggests this name came from the clouds that always hung over the place where the serpent lived. Susanoo sends the sword up to Amaterasu. It later comes down to earth with her grandson Ninigi and becomes one of the three Imperial Regalia.

Its better-known name, Kusanagi no tsurugi (草薙剣), "the grass-mower", is explained by a later story. Nipponica summarises it. The prince Yamato Takeru received the sword from his aunt Yamatohime at Ise. When a local chief in Sagami trapped him in a burning field, he cut the grass with it, lit a counter-fire and escaped. The Nihon Shoki says the sword was renamed then. Yamato Takeru later left it with Miyazu-hime in Owari, which explains why it came to be enshrined at Atsuta. Britannica Japan describes it as the shintai, the sacred object, of Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya.

Nipponica's entry does not accept the grass-mowing story at face value. It argues that the name means "fierce snake", which suits a sword taken from a serpent, and that the grass-cutting tale is a later folk explanation. Daijisen records a similar theory, in which nagi is an old word for snake. Nipponica also notes the sword's later history in the chronicles. It was stolen in 668 and recovered. In 686 a divination blamed the emperor's illness on the sword's curse, and it was sent back to Atsuta.

What was the serpent? Scholarly readings

The chronicles do not explain the serpent. Modern readings are interpretations, and the encyclopedias present them as such.

The river. The most common reading ties the serpent to the Hi (Hii) River. The Kokugakuin University Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that Kushinada-hime's name can be read as "rice-field princess". The serpent has been read as the river itself, and its defeat as the taming of the river for irrigation. Heibonsha takes the same line. In its view the serpent's size and power reflect the river and its seasonal floods, and the girl offered to it is a personified rice field. Britannica Japan mentions a theory that it deifies a river with eight tributaries.

Iron. A second reading links the story to iron. Nipponica cites the scholar Matsumae Takeshi (1970). In his view the myth began as snake-god worship at fertility rites along the Suga River in Izumo. It then moved to the Hi River, which had its own snake legends. There it was absorbed into the legend of Susanoo, a god with "a new iron culture" behind him, and took on details from the Chinese story of the Han founder's snake-slaying sword. The upper Hi valley is iron country. Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs describes Okuizumo, at the river's source, as rich in iron sand and as a centre of tatara iron-smelting in the early modern and modern periods. A Japan Tourism Agency text for a serpent sculpture at a museum there says the legend "highlights the long-held association between the Okuizumo region and swordsmithing". Readings that turn the serpent into a picture of smelting itself are popular, but they are modern theories, not anything the chronicles say.

Other readings. The Kokugakuin encyclopedia also mentions a theory that the serpent stood for a band of mountain outlaws. Nipponica notes that scholars compare the story with the worldwide "Andromeda" type, in which a hero saves a maiden offered to a monster. Aston made the same comparison with Perseus in 1896.

The serpent on stage: kagura

The serpent is best known today from kagura, the sacred dances of Shinto shrines. Nipponica describes Izumo kagura as a style that grew from the rites of Sada Shrine in Matsue. It combines dances with hand-held ritual objects and masked plays drawn from myths and shrine legends. The Sada Shrine performance, Sada shinnō, was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1976 and was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage lists in 2011. Its masked repertoire includes a piece called Yaegaki, after the "eightfold fence" of Susanoo's poem. Nipponica adds that this style spread across western Japan, including to the Iwami kagura of western Shimane.

In Iwami kagura the serpent is the star. The Japan Foundation calls Orochi (大蛇) the representative piece of Iwami kagura. It brought the dance to Trafalgar Square in London in 2019. Shimane Prefecture explains how the serpent's long body is made. In the Meiji era, performers stopped wrapping long cloths around themselves to play the serpent. Instead someone devised a collapsible body based on the paper lantern. It is still made by hand from Sekishū hanshi, the local paper, from the frame to the painting.

Places along the river also claim parts of the story. Yaegaki Shrine in Matsue, for example, says that its grove is where Susanoo hid Kushinada-hime behind the eightfold fence. That is a shrine tradition, not part of the chronicles.