Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/350

310 subdue and govern the world, i.e. Japan. Ultimately Oho-na-muchi and his son Koto-shiro-nushi (thing-know-master, or governor), agreed to yield the government to Hoho no ninigi, a grandchild of the Sun-Goddess, who accordingly descended to earth on a mountain in the western island of Kiushiu. He was attended by the ancestors of the five Be, or hereditary government corporations, viz.: the Nakatomi, the Imbe, the Sarume, the mirror-makers be, and the jewellers be, to which some accounts add several others.

Hoho no ninigi took to wife the daughter of a deity whom he found there. When the time came for her delivery, she shut herself up in a doorless shed, which, on the birth of her three children, she set fire to, with the object of clearing herself from certain suspicions which her husband had entertained of her fidelity. "If," said she, "the children are really the offspring of the Heavenly Grandchild, the fire cannot harm them." The children and their mother came forth unhurt, and were thereupon recognised by Hoho no ninigi as his true offspring and wife.

The "doorless shed" here mentioned, is a "parturition-house." It was the custom in ancient Japan, for women, when the time drew near for their delivery, to retire to a shed specially constructed to receive them, so that contamination to the dwelling-house might be avoided. This was still the practice in the island of Hachi-jō in 1878.

The burning of the parturition-house represents the ordeal by fire, which, with the ordeal by boiling water or mud, is well-known in Japan.

The story concerns itself no further with the eldest of these three children. Of the others, the senior, named Ho no Susori, became a fisherman, and the younger, Hohodemi, a hunter.

Ho no Susori once proposed to his brother to exchange their respective callings. Hohodemi accordingly gave over to his elder brother his bow and arrows, and received a fish-hook in return. But neither of them profited by the