Dogo Tama-no-Ishi Legend

The Dogo Tama-no-Ishi legend records the origin tradition of Dogo Onsen in Iyo (Ehime). According to the surviving fragments of the Iyo no Kuni Fudoki (c. 713), Okuninushi-no-Kami and Sukunabikona-no-Mikoto, journeying through the land in the course of country-making, came to Iyo, where Sukunabikona had fallen sick. Okuninushi soaked him in the hot spring and Sukunabikona recovered. Restored, he is said to have leapt up and danced on a stone beside the bath; that stone is preserved as the Tama-no-Ishi on the north side of the Dogo Onsen main building. The narrative has three stages: Sukunabikona's illness during the country-making journey; healing in the spring and dance on the stone; and later veneration of the stone within the hot-spring cult. The healing-deity element places this narrative within the medical-myth strand of the Kiki. The principal site is the Tama-no-Ishi at Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama; the nearby Isaniwa Jinja and Yu Jinja enshrine Okuninushi and Sukunabikona, and shrine records preserve the Tama-no-Ishi tradition. Reception in poetry begins in the Man'yoshu, volume 3 no. 322, in Yamabe no Akahito's long poem in praise of Dogo. Later references appear in the Edo Yoyo Gungo Rigen-shu and in Ehime and Matsuyama cultural-property records.