The Skinned Rabbit That Chose Japan's Kindest God

The Trick and the Consequence The rabbit's plan is a good one. It tells a line of wani — sea creatures, variously rendered as sharks or crocodiles — that it wants to count them to see which clan is more numerous, theirs or the rabbits'. They line up obligingly from the island to the shore, and it hops across, counting.

With one leap remaining it cannot resist announcing that it tricked them. The last one in the line catches it and tears off its fur, and the rabbit is left raw and in agony on the beach at Inaba.

That is a complete moral fable in itself, and Japanese children generally learn it as one. But the story is only half told at this point, and the second half is what it is actually for.

The Eighty Brothers and the Bad Advice Along the beach comes a procession: eighty brothers, all travelling to Inaba to compete for the hand of the same princess, and at the back, carrying everyone's luggage, the youngest and least regarded of them, Ōnamuji — later known as Ōkuninushi.

The brothers see the flayed rabbit and tell it to bathe in seawater and dry itself in the wind. It does, and the salt crusts and cracks in the drying and the pain becomes far worse. This is not carelessness on their part; the text presents it as deliberate cruelty for amusement.

When the youngest arrives, he tells the rabbit to wash in fresh river water and roll in the pollen of the kama grass. It works. The fur returns, and the rabbit — who is a deity in its own right — tells him that he, not his brothers, will win the princess. And he does.

Why This Story Is Everywhere It operates on several levels at once, which is unusual for a myth this short. As a children's tale it is about deceit having consequences. As a moral tale it is about the difference between advice given to hurt and advice given to help. And structurally it is an origin story: it establishes Ōkuninushi, the eventual ruler of the earthly realm and the deity of Izumo Taisha, as someone characterised primarily by kindness to a suffering animal.

That characterisation is doing real work. Ōkuninushi's brothers go on to try to kill him twice, and he survives to build the land and eventually to hand it over to Amaterasu's descendants in the negotiated transfer that ends the mythological age. The whole arc rests on him having been established, in his first appearance, as the one who helped.

En-musubi, and the Crowds at Izumo Because the rabbit's reward is a successful marriage prediction, Ōkuninushi became the deity of en-musubi — the tying of bonds. In practice that means relationships, and Izumo Taisha is now the country's most famous destination for people hoping to find or secure a partner.

The association is broader than romance, though. En covers connections of all kinds: friendships, working relationships, the useful coincidence of meeting the right person. The rabbit's role in the story is precisely to introduce two people who ought to meet, which is exactly what en-musubi means.

Where to Stand The beach in question is in eastern Tottori, and there is a shrine there — Hakuto Jinja — dedicated to the white rabbit, with a pond identified as where it washed. It is small and quiet and mostly visited by Japanese people who know the story from childhood.

Izumo Taisha itself, an hour or so west in Shimane, is where the story arrives. Rabbit statues are scattered across the grounds in considerable numbers, and once you know why they are there, a shrine that is otherwise vast and austere acquires a distinctly gentle undertone.