We took ourselves off for a bit of stroll the weekend before last as the sun, well, it wasn’t exactly shining, but as the fog was a little less dense than usual, you could catch glimpses of this glowing orb in the sky.
We went to Hachiman Jinja (shrine) near the old port. In over eight years living in the city it was my first time to visit. While I can’t say that those eight years were blighted by my ignorance of the place, it was still a pleasant surprise. That said, the bar is set quite low in Muroran, so ‘pleasant surprise’ can be applied to anything that isn’t made from corrugated iron and/or belching noxious smoke.
Anyway we pottered around for a while ringing bells, clapping hands, splashing water and generally letting the gods at Hachiman know that we were here and could they please do something about the fog.
Turns out they were the wrong gods. Enshrined at Hachiman is Ukemochi-no-Kami (the goddess of food) who, according to Wikipedia, “was visited by Tsukuyomi as she prepared a feast by facing the ocean and spitting out a fish, then she faced the forest and bountiful game spewed out of her mouth, finally turning to a rice paddy she coughed up a bowl of rice. Tsukuyomi was so disgusted he killed her. Even her dead body produced food: millet, rice, and beans sprang forth. Her eyebrows even became silkworms”.
To which all I can say is “eeuuughhh”. I am totally with Tsukuyomi-san on this one. Though I can relate to the eyebrows-becoming-silkworms. I wonder if anything similar happened to her ear-hair. I am expecting mine to turn into creeper vines.
But I digress.
Also there is Kotohira-no-kami, the god of the sea, who is a whole lot more acceptable than his fellow food-regurgitating deity.
Thankfully there were a couple of late blooming cherry trees to distract us from the thoughts of bountiful game spewing and coughing up rice bowls, though Cian reckons he wouldn't mind giving the latter a try.
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