Konohanasakuya-hime

Konohanasakuya-hime, whose name evokes the blossoming of the trees, is the kami of blossom and of Mount Fuji, a goddess of delicate beauty and of the transience that the cherry blossom, blooming brilliantly and falling swiftly, has always signified in Japan. In the mythic cycle of the descent of the heavenly line to earth, she is met and married by Ninigi, the grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu who has come down to rule the land. Her story turns on a trial of fidelity. Very soon after their marriage Konohanasakuya-hime conceives, and Ninigi, doubting that a child got so quickly could be his own and suspecting her of unfaithfulness, questions her honour.

To prove that the children are truly the offspring of the heavenly god and not of any earthly one, she makes a fierce wager: she shuts herself inside a birthing hut, seals it, and sets it ablaze, declaring that if the children are Ninigi's own they will come to no harm in the flames. In the heart of the fire she safely gives birth to her sons, vindicating her fidelity and the divine descent of her children, from whom, the tradition holds, the imperial line descends. As the goddess of Mount Fuji she is enshrined at the Sengen (Asama) shrines associated with the mountain, and she is invoked for safe childbirth, for the blossoming of the fields, and for the beauty and the poignant brevity that the flowering tree represents. Konohanasakuya-hime is one of the loveliest figures of the Shinto pantheon, the divine embodiment of blossom, of the sacred mountain, and of a beauty bound up with impermanence.

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki attach a second, harsher episode to Konohanasakuya-hime's marriage, one that explains why the imperial line, and human beings generally, do not live forever. Before Ninigi chose her, her father Oyamatsumi offered him both of his daughters together: Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom princess, and her elder sister Iwanaga-hime, the rock princess, whose name means long-enduring as stone. Ninigi, taken with the younger sister's beauty and repelled by the elder's plain appearance, sent Iwanaga-hime back to her father and kept only the blossom princess for his wife.

Oyamatsumi's response, in the telling preserved in the Nihon Shoki, was grief rather than anger at the insult: he explained that he had sent the two sisters together for a reason, so that Ninigi's descendants would have lived as long and unchanging as rock through Iwanaga-hime, while flourishing and prospering like the blossoming trees through Konohanasakuya-hime; by rejecting the rock sister, Ninigi had condemned his own line, and by extension humankind, to lives that bloom brilliantly and fall quickly, like the cherry blossom, rather than enduring like stone. The myth gives Konohanasakuya-hime's association with beautiful transience a second, more consequential meaning: her chosen beauty is also the origin, in this telling, of human mortality itself.