A son of Susanoo. An alternate account in the Nihon Shoki says he came down with his father to Soshimori in Silla, did not care for the place, built a boat of clay and crossed to Izumo.
He had brought down from heaven the seeds of many trees.
Isotakeru sowed none of the seeds on the peninsula and carried them all back. Beginning in Tsukushi, says the Nihon Shoki, he sowed them throughout the whole of the eight great islands until they were green mountains.
With his sisters Oyatsu-hime and Tsumatsu-hime he made the land green, and was honoured as the kami of merit. Myth assigns to him the reason that the mountains of Japan are green.
Where Kukunochi is the tree itself, this kami is the one who planted trees. The first is a god of condition, the second a god of act.
Governing the same thing, one is merely born and never spoken of again, while the other changes the land. Myth keeps two quite different ways of standing towards the same subject.
Trees, forestry and shipbuilding. Itakiso Jinja in Wakayama is his head shrine, and the province of Kii is linked by its name to trees. Because the region supplied ship timber, he has also been invoked for safe voyages.
Kii has supplied fine timber since antiquity, and its wood was carried to build the capitals. That the land which kept the worship of a tree-planting god was also the land that actually produced the timber shows how little distance there was between myth and livelihood.
A stick from ground that human hands have worked: a planted stand of cedar or cypress, a street tree, a tended coppice.
The Bureau sends this kami down not on sticks from wild mountains but on sticks from places where trees were put in the ground. Worked wood is still not eligible for appraisal — the condition holds that the stick must have fallen naturally from a planted tree.
Note: this section is the Bureau's own reading, not a record from the chronicles.
not yet recorded
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.