Oshirasama Legend

The Oshirasama tradition is a folk belief of household deities in eastern Tohoku, centered on Tono in Iwate, rooted in the marriage tale of a horse and a daughter. In one village there lived a daughter and a horse; the daughter grew fond of the horse and wished to be its wife. The father, in anger, hanged the horse on a mulberry tree and skinned it. As the daughter wept and clung to the hide, the hide wrapped her and rose to heaven, where the two became deities. Later the daughter appeared at her parents' bedside in the form of a silkworm and taught the origin of sericulture. From then on, in that household, husband-and-wife images carved from mulberry wood were dressed in layered garments and venerated indoors. This is Oshirasama, worshiped as household guardian of sericulture, agriculture, and divination in Tohoku. The tale has three stages: forbidden marriage (the crossing between human and animal), the father's intervention and harsh separation, and the ascent and deification with the founding of sericulture. The tale shares an old layer with the Chinese Soushen-ji "Bahi nyoka-san" (horse-hide girl becomes silkworm) story, but in Tohoku, joined with practice -- pillar images carved of mulberry wood, the yearly garment-renewal rite called Obese, and the itako's "Oshira-asobase" -- it formed its own living religion. The center is the Nanbu region of Iwate (Tono, Miyako, Morioka) and southern Aomori and northern Miyagi. Tono Densho-en in Tsuchibuchi-cho holds the Oshira-do; nationally designated as Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property "Materials on Oshirasama of Tono and Surrounding Areas." Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari, tale 69 (Meiji 43, 1910), Sasaki Kizen's Tono Monogatari Shui, Ino Kanori's Iwate-ken Kyodo-shi Kenkyu, and Agency for Cultural Affairs documents are the core references.