The Legend of Hoderi and the Lost Fishhook
At a Glance
- Central figures: Hoderi-no-Mikoto (“Prince of the Sea”), the elder brother and skilled fisherman; and Hoori-no-Mikoto (“Prince of the Mountain”), the younger brother and master hunter.
- Setting: The earthly realm and the undersea palace of the Sea God Watatsumi; a foundational myth from Japanese Shinto tradition concerning the ancestors of the imperial line.
- The turn: Hoori loses Hoderi’s precious fishhook in the sea while the brothers have traded roles, and Hoderi refuses any peace until it is returned.
- The outcome: Hoori recovers the hook from Watatsumi’s palace, returns it to Hoderi, and ultimately uses the tide jewels to force his brother’s submission and achieve reconciliation.
- The legacy: Hoori’s son Ugayafukiaezu, born of his marriage to Toyotama-hime, continued the Yamato lineage that led directly to Emperor Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan.
Hoderi stood at the edge of the water with his brother’s bow in his hand and nothing to show for the day. No birds, no game. The mountains had given him nothing. Somewhere out on the sea, his younger brother Hoori was learning the same lesson in reverse - sitting in a boat with Hoderi’s precious fishhook, pulling up empty water. One of them would come home with something to account for. The other would not.
The hook was gone before evening. Lost to the depths, and with it whatever goodwill remained between them.
The Exchange That Should Not Have Happened
The brothers had always kept to their separate domains. Hoderi-no-Mikoto, Umisachi-hiko - Prince of the Sea - knew the fish and the tides and the rhythms of the deep water. Hoori-no-Mikoto, Yamasachi-hiko - Prince of the Mountain - knew the forest paths and the flight of birds. Each respected the other’s skill. That respect, for a time, was enough.
It was Hoori who proposed the exchange. He was curious about the sea and thought his brother might enjoy a morning on the mountain. Hoderi agreed, reluctantly, and handed over the fishhook - his own hook, the one he had used for years - and took his brother’s bow in return. It seemed a small thing.
Hoori caught nothing. He tried for a long while, alone on the water, and when the hook snagged on something unseen and the line went slack, he understood what had happened. He reached down. The hook was simply gone.
The Confession and Its Aftermath
Hoori returned to Hoderi and said what needed to be said. He had lost the hook. He had not caught a single fish. He was sorry.
Hoderi’s reaction was not quiet. He demanded the hook back - not a replacement, not an apology, not Hoori’s own belongings offered as compensation. The specific hook. His hook. Hoori broke his own sword and fashioned five hundred new hooks from the metal and offered them to his brother. Hoderi refused them all. He made more, a thousand, and Hoderi refused those too. Nothing satisfied him. The rift between them deepened with each refusal, and Hoori was left with no option but to go into the sea and find what had been lost.
The Palace of Watatsumi
It was Shiotsuchi, the god of the tides, who showed Hoori the way. He told the young prince to visit the undersea palace of Watatsumi, the Sea God - also called Umiochi - and to seek his help there. Shiotsuchi built a small boat and set Hoori adrift, and the currents carried him down.
The palace was not what Hoori had imagined. It was vast and quiet and full of light that came from nowhere visible. At the gate stood a katsura tree with a well beneath it, and Hoori climbed into the tree and waited. When Toyotama-hime, the Sea God’s daughter, came to draw water, she looked up and found him watching her.
She brought him to her father.
Watatsumi welcomed Hoori as a guest and heard his story without hurry. He was not impatient with the problem of a missing fishhook. He summoned the creatures of the sea - every fish that swam in his waters - and asked them to search. They came back with an answer: a sea bream had been swimming strangely, unable to open its mouth properly. They found the hook lodged in its throat. Watatsumi retrieved it and gave it to Hoori.
While all this unfolded, Hoori and Toyotama-hime had been falling in love. He stayed in the sea realm. They married. Years passed in the way that time passes beneath the water - unevenly, at its own pace.
The Tide Jewels
When Hoori finally prepared to return to the surface, Watatsumi gave him two jewels. The kanju controlled the rising tide. The manju called the tide back. Watatsumi offered no complicated instructions. Hoori understood what they were for.
He came home with the fishhook in his hand and apology on his lips. Hoderi took the hook and did not soften. His anger had not diminished in the years since - if anything it had fixed itself in place, hardened into a posture he no longer knew how to leave.
Hoori held the kanju out over the water. The tide rose.
Hoderi struggled as the sea climbed around him. He was a prince of the sea and yet the water did not spare him. It came in steady and indifferent, and when it reached his chest he was no longer angry - he was afraid. He called out to his brother. He promised to let go of his grievance. He promised submission and remorse and whatever else was asked of him.
Hoori raised the manju. The tide fell back.
The Lineage That Followed
Hoderi, standing wet and humbled on the shore, meant what he had said. Something in him had broken open, and what came out was not more anger but a kind of exhausted contrition. He accepted his brother’s apology. He acknowledged his own stubbornness. The recovered fishhook passed between them for the last time, and the matter was closed.
Hoori returned to Toyotama-hime, who had followed him to the surface to give birth to their child. The boy was named Ugayafukiaezu. Toyotama-hime had asked Hoori not to look at her during the birth - there were things about her nature that she wished to keep from him - and Hoori looked anyway. He saw what she was. She returned to the sea and did not come back, and Ugayafukiaezu was raised without her.
That child grew up and had a son of his own: Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan. The line ran from the sea god’s palace to the throne - through a lost fishhook, a tide jewel, a wife who swam back into the deep water, and two brothers standing on a shore deciding whether to forgive each other. The imperial lineage did not begin in triumph. It began in apology, in stubbornness overcome, in water rising around a man who had pushed too long and held too hard, and finally let go.