After Susanoo killed the serpent, after he saved Kushinada-hime, he set out to find a place to build them a home. He travelled. He surveyed. And at last, in a small valley north of where Susa Jinja now stands, he arrived at a clearing and stopped. He looked around. He said: “Suga-suga-shi” — refreshing, clear.
He built a palace on that spot. The place took its name from his word. It became Suga.
The first palace
Suga Jinja is called Nihon-hatsu-no-miya — “the first palace in Japan.” The claim is specific. This is not the first shrine, nor the first sacred site; both of those titles belong to other places in older traditions. This is the first palace — the first imperial-style dwelling structure built by a god on earth, the first private residence in the country.
It is also the place where, according to the Kojiki, Susanoo composed the Yakumo tatsu poem. As clouds rose over the new building, he saw eight fences of cloud forming around it, sheltering Kushinada-hime inside. He spoke the first waka.
The poem, then, is twice rooted. It is rooted physically here, at the building that inspired it. And it is rooted at Yaegaki, the shrine that takes its name from the poem’s image. Both places carry the story. They are sister sites along the same narrative line.
The grove and the rock
The current shrine is modest — a small honden, a worship hall, a stone torii, and a path leading up the hill behind the main precinct to Yakumo-yama, the mountain that lent its name to the poem. The climb takes around twenty minutes. At the top is a great rock, an iwakura — a sacred boulder — where Susanoo and Kushinada-hime are said to have first prayed together. The view from up here extends across the small valley to the cedar-covered hills beyond. The clouds, on most days, do something close to what the poem describes.
The continuity
Suga is small and easy to miss. It is in a residential district of Unnan, half an hour by car from Matsue, with no train station nearby. Coming here requires effort. But the effort is the point. This is the place where a god first decided to make a home and a marriage and a poem; the visitor is invited to do something similar in spirit — to arrive somewhere, look around, find it good, and stay a while.
Editor’s note
If you are walking the Kojiki Trail in the proper sequence, Suga comes after Yaegaki and before Susa. That is the chronological order of the Susanoo episode. Susanoo arrives, hides his bride at Yaegaki, builds his palace at Suga, lives his life, and rests at Susa. The three shrines, walked in order, tell the story. Most visitors, sensibly, do them in a day.