The Tale of Yamato Takeru
At a Glance
- Central figures: Yamato Takeru, also known as Prince Osu - legendary warrior son of Emperor Keiko; Yamatohime-no-Mikoto, his aunt and high priestess of the Ise Grand Shrine.
- Setting: Ancient Japan, the Yamato province and the eastern and western provinces; the story derives from the chronicles of the Yamato royal court.
- The turn: Yamatohime gives Yamato Takeru the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi before his campaign in the east, and the sword’s power saves him from a trap of fire set by a treacherous chieftain.
- The outcome: Yamato Takeru subdues the eastern Emishi tribes but falls ill on the road and dies, transforming into a white heron that rises into the sky.
- The legacy: The Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, one of the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan, is enshrined at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya, where Yamato Takeru is venerated.
Prince Osu killed his elder brother at sixteen. The brother had been summoned to Emperor Keiko’s table five times and had not come, and so the emperor sent Osu to ask why. When Osu returned, he reported that the matter was settled. Pressed on what that meant, he explained that he had seized the brother by the limbs at dawn and torn him apart, wrapping the remains in a reed mat to be buried. Keiko stared at his son. The boy was useful, and terrifying, and too dangerous to keep close.
He sent him to Kyushu.
The Feast of the Kumaso Brothers
The Kumaso were powerful warriors who had broken from the Yamato court, and Keiko wanted them destroyed. Osu went south with a plan that owed nothing to open battle. He borrowed women’s robes and let his hair down and combed it flat, and he walked into the Kumaso feast looking like a girl come to serve wine.
The brothers were charmed. The feast went on. When the leader leaned close, Osu drew his blade and drove it through him. He killed the second brother as he ran. But the first, bleeding out on the earthen floor, looked up at the young man standing over him and named him. He said: you are braver than any warrior in the west. You should be called Yamato Takeru - the Brave of Yamato. Then he died.
Osu kept the name.
Yamatohime and the Grass-Cutting Sword
Back in Yamato, the emperor was pleased and immediately found another use for him. The Emishi tribes of the east were restless. Yamato Takeru was to go and subdue them. He was given a small escort - fewer men than the mission warranted - and sent out again.
He stopped first at the Ise Grand Shrine to see his aunt, Yamatohime-no-Mikoto, who served there as high priestess. He had not seen her since childhood. He stood before her and did not speak for a moment. Later accounts say he wept, though this is not certain. What is certain is that he said to her: the emperor sends me out to die.
Yamatohime said nothing to contradict him. She brought out the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi - the Grass-Cutting Sword - and placed it in his hands. The sword had been found inside the body of the Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-headed serpent that Susanoo had killed in ages before men counted years. It was one of three sacred objects at the center of Yamato’s divine inheritance. She also gave him a fire-striker and a small bag, and told him to open the bag if he found himself without a way forward.
He bowed and left Ise and rode east.
The Burning Field
Somewhere in the eastern provinces, a local chieftain invited Yamato Takeru to hunt on his land. The invitation was false. The chieftain had chosen a meadow of dense dry grass, and once Yamato Takeru rode into its center, men circled the perimeter and set fire to the edges.
The grass went up fast. Smoke first, then the sound of it. Yamato Takeru looked around at the ring of orange closing in and drew the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi. He began to cut the grass at his feet - clearing a circle, widening it, the sword moving in arcs through the stalks. And then the wind shifted. It turned back on itself, driving the fire outward toward the chieftain’s own men. The sword, it is said, had that power: to call the wind and aim it.
The chieftain’s trap consumed the chieftain’s forces. Yamato Takeru walked out of the field when the flames had passed. He used the fire-striker Yamatohime had given him to burn the chieftain’s hall to the ground, and kept moving east.
The Provinces Subdued
The campaigns in the eastern lands were long. Yamato Takeru moved through hostile country, fighting where he had to and making alliances where he could. He crossed the bay at Owari during a storm that nearly sank his boat; the woman traveling with him, Ototachibana-hime, stepped into the sea to calm the waves, and drowned. He stood at the stern watching the surface close over where she had been. He came back to shore and climbed the hills on the far side and looked back west, and the accounts say he called out her name three times.
He defeated the Emishi. He brought the eastern provinces under Yamato authority. He turned back toward home.
The White Heron of Nobo Pass
He was tired in a way that sleep did not fix. The exhaustion had settled into him somewhere in the east and would not lift. His aunt had warned him, or perhaps he had warned himself - he had said it plainly at Ise. The emperor sends me out to die.
Crossing through the mountains of Ise Province on the road home, his legs gave out. He rested at the foot of a pine. The sword was not with him - he had left the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi at Atsuta before the mountain crossing, perhaps out of reverence, perhaps from some dread he did not name. Without it, he was only a man who had been fighting since he was sixteen years old.
He composed a poem about the sword, which the old chronicles preserved. Then he died.
What rose from the place where he fell was a white heron - or a white swan, the sources differ on the bird - that flew up through the pine canopy and climbed until it was gone. The attendants who had been traveling with him built a tomb at the foot of the pass. Then, it is said, the bird returned and settled near it. They built another tomb where the heron landed. And when it flew again, they followed it, building small mounds wherever it touched down, until at last it rose and did not come back.
The Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi remained at Atsuta. The Atsuta Shrine stands in Nagoya now, and the sword is still said to be there, and Yamato Takeru is venerated within its precincts - the prince who was given the name of a hero by the man he killed, who burned fields and crossed storms and died in the mountains on a road that led, in the end, nowhere but up.