A water goddess born from the urine of Izanami as she lay burned and dying. The Kojiki names her Mizuhanome; the Nihon Shoki writes her as Mizuhanome in different characters.
Wakumusubi was born in the same moment, and his child was Toyouke — the goddess of food enshrined at the Outer Shrine of Ise. A genealogy in which food comes out of water is set down right here.
Where Watatsumi is the kami of the sea and Okami the kami of rain and headwaters, this one belongs to wells, channels and irrigation — the water people draw and use.
Almost no deeds are told of her. Yet the sense that a god dwells in water drawn each day, led into the paddies and boiled on the hearth, runs deeper into ordinary life than any dramatic story.
'Mizuha' is explained either as water creeping as it flows, or as making water run. Either way it names water in motion, not water at rest.
The characters the Nihon Shoki uses, read Mizuha, are borrowed from the name of a water spirit in the Chinese classics — one instance of continental characters being fitted to a Japanese kami, and a record of what the scribes of the day thought was close to it.
Water, and above all well water and irrigation. She is often enshrined alongside Okami at shrines of water, including Niukawakami Jinja in Nara, and appears across Japan as a well kami honoured on household grounds.
Water kami appearing as goddesses is not peculiar to her. One of the Okami is also female, and water has long been understood alongside the act of bearing. That sense — birth and water on the same side — is already there in the passage where a water goddess comes from Izanami's body.
A stick found beside damp earth: on the ridge of a paddy, at the lip of an irrigation channel, fallen from a tree beside a well.
The Bureau reads this kami not by water itself but by distance from human life. A stick from a mountain stream belongs to Okami; one from where people have led water belongs here. Two equally wet sticks are divided by where they were picked up.
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.