Why Can Shizuku Talk to Spirits? The Gods of Suwa Behind The Elusive Samurai

October 20, 2026

Introduction

In The Elusive Samurai, a mysterious girl named Shizuku stands beside Suwa Yorishige. She can talk with spirits and sacred beasts. A guide in Suwa told me he thinks Shizuku is modeled on Mishaguchi, the ancient god of Suwa, or on the Moriya family, who called that god down.

So who is Mishaguchi? The gods of Suwa never stayed in one form. A Jōmon serpent god, a god defeated in Japan’s founding myths, a dragon god who raised the “divine wind” against the Mongols, a war god worshiped by samurai. Each age laid a new form on top of the old, yet the older layers never disappeared. I walked Suwa Grand Shrine and listened to the staff of the Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum and to local people. Here I sort what they told me, separating what the records confirm from what has been handed down.

Mishaguchi, the Jōmon serpent god, and the Moriya family

In Suwa, it is said, there has been a god since Jōmon times called Mishaguchi, and its true form is a serpent. The family that could call this god down was the Moriya. For generations they served as the Jinchōkan, the chief priests of Suwa’s Upper Shrine, and carried out Mishaguchi’s rites.

The Moriya family continues today; the current head, the 78th generation, is a woman. According to her, the god’s name is “Mishaguchi.” The museum staff told me there are many variants: Mishaguji, Mishakuji, and several ways of writing it in kanji. In this article I follow the name used by the family that kept its rites.

“Since Jōmon times” is an influential view that links Mishaguchi to the rich Jōmon sites at the foot of the Yatsugatake mountains and to the worship of stone rods found there. It is not proven. Mishaguchi’s nature is also debated: a spirit dwelling in stones and trees, a god of boundaries, and more. The serpent is one of these overlapping layers.

✦ Satoe’s Take Jōmon faith is thought to have been animism: worship of the spirits living in great stones and trees. According to the museum staff, the Moriya could call Mishaguchi down not only into a person but into trees and rocks. Because it descends into stones and trees, it can hear the voices of the spirits living there and speak with them. I think Mishaguchi was a kind of representative who listened to those spirits and gathered their voices together. That is why the Moriya, who could call Mishaguchi down, remained the heart of Suwa’s rites. And that, I think, is why Shizuku in the manga can talk with spirits.

The legend of a Mononobe son in the Moriya family

Mononobe no Moriya, who opposed the adoption of Buddhism, was destroyed by Soga no Umako and his allies in 587. The Moriya family has a tradition that Moriya’s second son, Takemaro, fled to Suwa, was taken in by the family, and became its 27th head. The mountain behind the Upper Shrine’s main precinct is called Mount Moriya, and the shared sound “Moriya” is told as proof of the link. From Takemaro, the family has continued some fifty more generations to the present 78th head.

Behind the Moriya house there is an old burial mound said by some to be Takemaro’s, and close by, a shrine to Mishaguchi. Because of this connection, the family name is sometimes written with the same characters as Mononobe no Moriya’s.

This is a family tradition and cannot be confirmed by records from the time. Some scholars think the name Moriya comes from the god Moriya-no-kami, and that the Mononobe story was attached later.

✦ Satoe’s Take The Mononobe opposed Buddhism and cherished Japan’s ancient gods. The tradition that their blood entered the Moriya family shows, I think, how deeply the Moriya valued the old rites. Even if it is not historical fact, the very choice to hand down such a lineage reveals the family’s pride.

The birth of Takeminakata: son of the jade goddess

Takeminakata, the god of Suwa, is the son of Ōkuninushi, the great god of Izumo. His mother is Nunakawa-hime, the jade goddess of what is now Itoigawa on the Japan Sea coast.

The story I grew up hearing goes like this. In what is now Itoigawa, there lived a beautiful princess. Ōkuninushi heard of her all the way in Izumo, traveled the long road to find her, and from their union Takeminakata was born.

Itoigawa jade was carried as far as Izumo. That, I think, is how this story came to be told.

(The Kojiki records Ōkuninushi’s courtship of Nunakawa-hime, and separately records Takeminakata as Ōkuninushi’s son. It does not name her as his mother; that link appears in the later Sendai Kuji Hongi. The connection between Nunakawa-hime and jade is usually traced to a poem in the Man’yōshū that sings of “the jewel at the bottom of the Nunakawa river.” That jewel is thought to be jade.)

Takeminakata, the god who lost the land

Long ago, Ōkuninushi ruled the land of Japan. Then messengers came from the gods of Takamagahara, the High Plain of Heaven, that is, from the sun goddess Amaterasu, demanding that he hand the land over. One view holds that Ōkuninushi stands for the people already living in Japan, and the heavenly gods for people who crossed over from the continent.

Of Ōkuninushi’s sons, the elder, Kotoshironushi, accepted the transfer. Only the second son, Takeminakata, resisted. So Takemikazuchi, sent down from heaven, met him in a trial of strength.

When Takeminakata tried to seize Takemikazuchi’s arm, it turned into a pillar of ice, then into a sword blade, and he could not grip it. Then Takemikazuchi seized Takeminakata’s hand, crushed it like a young reed, and threw him. This is said to be the origin of sumo, and Suwa Grand Shrine still has a sumo ring.

Defeated, Takeminakata was chased all the way to the lake of Suwa in Shinano. There he swore, “I will never leave this place,” and his life was spared. Locally, people told me he “was thrown so hard he flew all the way to Suwa.”

In the version I heard, the fleeing god finally gave up on the shore of Lake Suwa, raised four pillars, and swore inside them that he would never leave, and so his life was spared. To this day, the shrines of the Suwa region are surrounded by four pillars. (The Kojiki says nothing about pillars.)

This scene of resistance appears only in the Kojiki. Takeminakata does not appear in the Nihon Shoki at all.

Pillars around even the smallest shrines

The pillars are not only for the great shrines. Walking around Suwa, I noticed that even small shrines, and even monuments, have pillars standing around them. One I saw was a stone marker reading “The residence of Prince Munenaga stood here.” Pillars surrounded that stone too. Where I grew up, in Matsumoto, there is no such custom, so I found it fascinating.

At the Onbashira festival of Suwa Grand Shrine, four pillars, the First through Fourth Pillar, are raised at the corners of each of the four shrine precincts. And in Onbashira years, the small local shrines of the Suwa region also hold their own pillar-raising festivals, called Komiya-sai.

✦ Satoe’s Take The pillars are explained as marking a sacred boundary. If so, then raising pillars, whether around a shrine or a monument, declares “this is sacred ground.” The story of a god who raised four pillars and swore never to leave still lives on, in visible form, in the daily lives of the people of Suwa.

The battle at the Tenryū River

In Suwa’s own tradition, though, the roles are reversed. Takeminakata, the newcomer, is the winner: he defeated the local god Moriya-no-kami, ancestor of the Moriya family.

The two fought across the Tenryū River, which flows out of Lake Suwa. Moriya-no-kami held an iron ring; Takeminakata held a branch of wisteria. Takeminakata won. To this day in Okaya City, Moriya Shrine and Fujishima Shrine, where the wisteria branch is said to have taken root, face each other across the river.

Takeminakata is said to be the god of farmers and Moriya-no-kami the god of hunters, and the tradition holds that the two came to rule together so that both ways of life could go on. But the framing of “farmers and hunters” or “Yayoi and Jōmon” is partly a model proposed by modern scholars and local historians.

The land itself is special. Suwa sits where two great fault lines meet: the Itoigawa–Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Median Tectonic Line. Standing there, I saw gentle mountains to the east and steep ones to the west, with something like a crack between them. To the east spread highlands built by the volcanoes of Yatsugatake and Kirigamine.

✦ Satoe’s Take As the fault shows, I believe this was the boundary between the gods who lived on either side. East of the fault, the gentle foothills of Yatsugatake were the hunting land of Moriya-no-kami and his people. Indeed, many Jōmon sites remain there. From the west came a god who brought rice farming and new skills, gathered people together, and set out to rule the land. The crack in the earth divided two worlds, and the Tenryū River, flowing along that seam, became the battlefield of the two gods.

The Itoigawa–Shizuoka Tectonic Line is also said to mark the boundary between eastern and western plates. Each land had its own gods. Where the lands collide, the gods collided too. In feng shui, the paths along which the earth’s energy flows like a dragon are called “dragon veins.” Perhaps Suwa’s god, worshiped as a dragon, lived on just such a vein of the earth.

Over the pass is another country

To me, raised in Matsumoto, crossing Shiojiri Pass means entering another country. Shiojiri Pass is in fact on Japan’s central watershed. On the far side, Suwa’s water flows south as the Tenryū River into the Pacific. On this side, the water flows north toward the Sea of Japan.

I find this deeply disorienting. Watching the rivers, my sense of direction slips. Only by looking at the sun do I find my bearings again. Anyone crossing that pass to attack must have had a hard time of it.

✦ Satoe’s Take How could Takeminakata, born in Itoigawa on the Japan Sea side, cross that pass and become the god of Suwa? I wondered. Perhaps that is exactly why he is remembered as “the god who came from outside,” and why he had to fight the local god Moriya-no-kami.

What surprised me in Suwa was that it is not a culture that treasures jade. What it treasures is obsidian. Large pieces of obsidian sit proudly all over town, and some are even enshrined.

North of Lake Suwa, from Kirigamine to Wada Pass, lies one of Japan’s richest sources of obsidian. At the Hoshigatō site in Shimosuwa, traces of Jōmon-era obsidian mining have been found. Obsidian splits into razor-sharp points and makes arrowheads. Its black gleam is beautiful too. For people who lived by hunting, it must have been the most precious stone of all.

The son of the jade goddess entered the land of obsidian. Itoigawa’s jade and Suwa’s obsidian: the two stones seem to embody the difference between the two sides of the pass.

The treasures differ in the same way. In Itoigawa, jade magatama, comma-shaped beads, are handled with obvious reverence. The Three Sacred Treasures of the emperor in the west include a magatama.

Local people told me the Ōhōri had three sacred treasures too: a mirror, a bell, and a stirrup. When a boy became Ōhōri, these three were handed to him, and by them he became the Ōhōri.

The mirror is shared with the emperor’s treasures. But there is no magatama. In its place is a stirrup, for riding a horse. Not a jade bead, but the gear for mounting a horse, was the mark of the living god.

And the even older god Mishaguchi is said to have had three sacred treasures of its own: an iron tettaku bell, an iron ring bell, and a pair of yin-yang stones, one male and one female.

✦ Satoe’s Take Just as the emperor in the west had three sacred treasures, the living god of the east had his own. That his set includes a stirrup shows, I think, that he was the god of eastern warriors who rode, hunted, and fought. And Mishaguchi’s treasures include yin-yang stones, a male stone and a female stone, echoing the winter rite in which a male serpent and a female serpent were joined to bring the god down. Here, I think, survives the mark of a god from a layer older than either the emperor’s or the Ōhōri’s.

Iron and wisteria

Izumo was iron country. You would expect the newcomer Takeminakata to be the one carrying iron. Yet in the legend, it is Moriya-no-kami who holds the iron ring. Why?

✦ Satoe’s Take I believe it is because iron belonged to Moriya-no-kami’s side as a tool of ritual. Mishaguchi’s sacred treasures include two iron ritual objects. One is the tettaku, also called the sanagi bell, which I saw at [守矢資料館]. Six thin iron sheets, each rolled into a cone, are bundled together, with an iron clapper hanging inside each one. A deputy of the Ōhōri would gather people at Mishaguchi’s sacred places across the region, trees and rocks, and ring this bell to perform the rites.

The other, the iron ring bell, I have seen only in photographs, but it looks exactly like an iron ring. Could the “iron ring” Moriya-no-kami held in the legend be this very bell? What he carried was not a weapon but an iron instrument for calling the god. The power to bring the god down was bound to iron, and so, in the legend, the iron belongs to Moriya-no-kami.

Fujimori Terunobu has written about the Ontōsai, the Upper Shrine’s spring festival, in a leaflet for the Jinchōkan Moriya Historical Museum. Fujimori is from Chino; he is the architect who designed the museum, his debut work as an architect in 1991. Today he is director of the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

According to him, the Ontōsai has a pillar called the onie-bashira, the offering pillar, and a scene in which a priest cuts notches into it with a fuji-gatana, a sword wrapped in wisteria vine.

✦ Satoe’s Take Look closely at any festival and you will find a story in it. In an age before writing, festivals were also a way of handing a land’s history down to its people. By repeating the same movements every year, and passing those movements on to the next generation, history is carried forward with certainty.

Within the rites of the Moriya, keepers of the iron ritual objects, a wisteria sword is swung. I believe this re-enacts the battle at the Tenryū River, when the wisteria branch defeated Moriya-no-kami and his iron ring. There is no written record. But I believe a real battle was once fought across the Tenryū. Its memory became the legend of two gods at war, then the movement of the wisteria sword, and has been retold through the festival for more than a thousand years.

The making of a living god

The head of the Suwa family, said to descend from Takeminakata, was called the Ōhōri and was regarded as the god himself, a living god. And it was the rites of the defeated Moriya that made him.

The museum staff described the Moriya’s power as “manipulating the god.” They call the god down, and they send the god back up. Call it down into a person, and that person becomes the Ōhōri. They could also call Mishaguchi down into trees and rocks.

So every winter, the Moriya shut themselves into an earthen pit at the Upper Shrine’s Maemiya and called Mishaguchi down into the Ōhōri, praying for the fertility of the land.

I write about the Ōhōri’s life and this winter rite in more detail in [Could Suwa Yorishige See the Future? Life in a Living God’s House].

The Upper and Lower Shrines, and Omiwatari

The Upper Shrine enshrines the male god, Takeminakata; the Lower Shrine, the female god, his consort Yasakatome. In winter, when Lake Suwa freezes, a ridge of cracked ice called Omiwatari runs across it from the Upper Shrine side toward the Lower Shrine side. It has long been seen as the path the male god walks to visit the female god.

Omiwatari is a legend, but also a record. Yatsurugi Shrine on the lakeshore judges each ridge and the date it appears and holds a ritual, and its record has continued since 1443. Today it is studied as long-term climate data.

The Lower Shrine has two precincts, Harumiya and Akimiya. The mountain god was believed to come down to Harumiya in spring to become the god of the rice fields, and to return to the mountains after the autumn harvest. In the actual rites, the deity moves from Akimiya to Harumiya on February 1 and back on August 1.

The Upper Shrine is strong in Mishaguchi and hunting; the Lower Shrine, in the married gods and the rice calendar. Here too, hunting and farming live side by side.

Takeminakata the dragon god and the Mongol invasions

People I spoke with in Suwa believe Takeminakata is a dragon god, and that when the shogunate prayed to him during the Mongol invasions, he raised the divine wind.

There is medieval textual support for this. The Suwa Daimyōjin Ekotoba, compiled in 1356, tells how the god of Suwa took the form of a great dragon, flew west, and sank the Mongol ships. After the invasions, though, many shrines, starting with Ise’s shrine of the wind, claimed rewards for “our god raised the wind,” and Suwa was one of them. That the god of Suwa had long been imagined as a serpent or dragon, as in the legend of Kōga Saburō, made the dragon story feel natural.

The meat license and Suwa shrines across Japan

There are said to be some fifteen thousand Suwa shrines across Japan, and this is thought to be because Suwa issued the kajikimen. Buddhism taught that eating four-legged animals brought punishment; the kajikimen was a talisman permitting it. On it was a four-line verse called the “Suwa Text”:

Beings whose karma is spent cannot live even if set free; so they dwell in a human body, and together attain Buddhahood.

Eating the animal, in other words, becomes a memorial for it: a clever logic of an age when gods and Buddhism were fused. The museum displays one, and you can still receive a kajikimen and special chopsticks at Suwa Grand Shrine today.

Traveling priests carried the kajikimen across the country. The other route was warriors: eastern vassals who moved to new lands founded Suwa shrines there. From both the lives of ordinary people and the faith of warriors, Suwa belief spread nationwide.

✦ Satoe’s Take

The god of Suwa never stayed in one form. The serpent god Mishaguchi, said to date from the Jōmon era; Takeminakata, defeated and confined in the myths of Yamato; the dragon god who raised the divine wind; the war god of the samurai. Each age added a new form, and the older layers remained.

What fascinates me most is that the newcomer who won became the living god, while the defeated Moriya kept, for over a thousand years, the rites that called the god down. The Suwa could not become gods without the Moriya.

The Ōhōri stood in front as the god. But it was the Moriya who called the god down and manipulated him. The one who stands in front and the ones who move him are different people. This shape appears all through Japanese history.

The Kamakura shogunate was the same. The shoguns were nobles and princes brought from Kyoto, while the Hōjō regents actually ran the government, and deeper still, the Hōjō main line and its private retainers held power. In The Elusive Samurai, there is a scene where Settsu Chikaaki tells his daughter that Tokiyuki will only become a figurehead king, just like his father.

Hearing about the winter rite reminded me of my trip to Cambodia. A local guide told me the country was born when a male serpent and a female serpent joined. In the Cambodian founding myth, a prince from across the sea married the daughter of the Nāga serpent king, and the kingdom began. There is even a record that in the Angkor era, people believed disaster would strike unless the king lay each night with a serpent spirit in the form of a woman. That a king’s legitimacy is born from union with a serpent god closely resembles the Ōhōri, who became a living god when Mishaguchi was called down into him.

At the time, I thought Japan was very different: our islands were made by stirring the sea with a spear. But that is the myth of the Yamato court. Even there, Izanagi and Izanami join to give birth to the islands. And Yamato has Ōmononushi of Mount Miwa, who appears as a serpent. The serpent faith that never came to the surface in Yamato’s official myths remained, in Suwa, at the very center of the rites as Mishaguchi. Seen this way, the age of Suwa’s faith stands out all the more.

Meiji: the land transfer completed

In 1871, hereditary priesthood at shrines was abolished nationwide. In Suwa, the office of Ōhōri and the office of the Moriya’s Jinchōkan were both lost in the same year. The family that held the god and the family that called him down vanished together, on a single sheet of paper.

At a shrine like Ise, when the priesthood changed, the sacred object stayed in the hall. But in Suwa, the god’s body was a living person. To lose the Ōhōri was to lose the god’s body.

✦ Satoe’s Take In the Kojiki, Takeminakata swore never to leave and gave up the land. Yet in Suwa, for more than a thousand years afterward, the living god and the rites of the defeated god’s descendants continued. He gave up the land, but he never gave up the god’s body.

In the Meiji era, that too was finally taken. The mythical transfer of the land was completed in Meiji. And the one it was handed to was not the Yamato court, but the modern state of Meiji.

And modernity was something that denied the existence of unseen spirits.

In Peter Pan, every time a child says “I don’t believe in fairies,” a fairy somewhere falls down dead. Tinker Bell, too, weakens when no one believes in her. Isn’t it the same with spirits? Denied, they disappear. The spirits that lived in stones and trees were denied by modernity, and I think they breathed their last. Perhaps Mishaguchi is gone too.

But Tinker Bell came back to life when the children clapped and said they believed.

In Suwa, there is a shrine where a god is said to appear once every three hundred years: Okkoto Suwa Shrine in Fujimi. Records of it are said to survive from the Muromachi and Edo periods.

No one knows what appears. But it is said that the villagers were so overjoyed they went wild and turned to bones.

A local told me, “It’s less than a hundred years now.” Within a hundred years, perhaps, a new god will come back to life.