As Izanami lay burned and dying from giving birth to the god of fire, many gods came from her body: Kanayamabiko and Kanayamabime from her vomit, Haniyasubiko and Haniyasubime from her excrement, Mizuhanome and Wakumusubi from her urine.
Haniyasu — the pair Haniyasubiko and Haniyasubime — are the kami born of earth.
'Hani' is clay: the stuff of fired pots, of haniwa figures, of plastered walls. It is the first material to which human hands ever gave a shape.
That this kami was born out of a dying agony, and out of filth, is not incidental. Japanese myth is saying that the most basic material comes from the lowest place.
Haniyasubiko and Haniyasubime were born as a male and female pair. Paired kami are common in the Kojiki, but that the god of earth should be paired carries its own sense.
Clay alone makes no vessel. The hand that works and the earth that yields, the shaping force and the material shaped — a form appears only when both are present.
Soil and clay. Haniyasu appears as the kami of pottery, earthworks and cultivated ground, honoured at shrines to the founders of ceramic craft and at shrines of the soil, and invoked in agricultural rites.
Every craft of earth — digging, banking, firing, plastering — begins by breaking the ground and remaking it. That this kami came out of Izanami's dying body is of a piece with that. Work in earth is work that builds from what has been broken.
A stick caked in mud: half-buried in the ground, crusted with dried earth, stained the same colour as the soil it came from.
The Bureau does not wash a submission before appraising it. Clinging earth is part of the stick's history, and it is precisely there that Haniyasu settles. The end nearest the root — the end that lay underground — calls this kami most strongly.
Note: this section is the Bureau's own reading, not a record from the chronicles.
The share of issued certificates in which this kami appeared. It shifts as more sticks are appraised. Variant spellings are reconciled before counting.
No published certificate bears this kami yet.