Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) · 125 of 191

[Sect. CXVIII.—Emperor Ō-Jin (Part XV.—His Age and Place of Burial).]

The august years of this Heavenly Sovereign Homuda were altogether one hundred and thirty. His august mausoleum is on the mound of Mofusu 1 at Wega in Kafuchi.

Context

Ōjin's traditional age at death — one hundred and thirty — sits inside the same convention that gave Jim-mu one hundred and thirty-seven and Sūjin one hundred and sixty-eight. None of these are calendar years in the modern sense. They mark the sacred-time deep antiquity of the line. Where the chronicle places Ōjin's mausoleum, however, the modern visitor can still see it: the Kondayama Kofun in Habikino, Osaka prefecture, is the second-largest keyhole-shaped tomb on Earth (after Nin-toku's Daisen Kofun), some 425 meters long. The Imperial Household Agency officially identifies it as Ōjin's burial, and as with all imperial tombs, archaeological excavation is forbidden. Whether the identification is correct or not, the scale of the monument is independently verifiable — Ōjin was a figure significant enough that the late-fourth or early-fifth century Yamato polity was willing to mobilize the labor of tens of thousands to build him a tomb visible from low Earth orbit.Kojiki CXVIII (Ōjin's Burial)

Insight

It's worth pausing on what happens to Ōjin in Japanese religion after the chronicle closes his reign. By the early Heian period (early ninth century) Ōjin had been deified and absorbed into the syncretic cult of Hachiman, the kami of war and protector of the imperial line. From the Heian forward, Hachiman became one of the most widely venerated deities in Japan — the tutelary kami of the Minamoto samurai clan (which produced the Kamakura shogunate in 1192), the kami invoked by Japanese armies through the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, and the focus of more than 25,000 shrines across Japan today (more than any other single kami). The Buddhist honji suijaku doctrine of the medieval period went further and identified Hachiman as a manifestation of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida in Japanese). So the relatively understated Ōjin of the Kojiki text becomes, over the next millennium, one of the most consequential religious figures in Japanese history — the kami of the samurai class, the war-god of the medieval empire.Kojiki CXVIII (Ōjin's Burial)

Footnotes 332:1 p. 332 Or, as Motowori reads it, Mofushi. The etymology is uncertain. Wega has already appeared in Sect. CIII (Note 3). The Old Printed Edition and some Manuscripts have at the conclusion of this volume the following note: , "It is the mausoleum of Mozu." But Mozu is in the province of Idzumi, and all the later editions discard this note as an interpolation.