An Island Leading to the Dragon's Palace: The Legend of "Umisachi and Yamasachi" Remaining in Miyanoura and Awa (Early Modern Period-Postwar Period)

An Island Leading to the Dragon's Palace: The Legend of "Umisachi and Yamasachi" Remaining in Miyanoura and Awa (Early Modern Period-Postwar Period)

There are places on the seashore of Yakushima Island that are said to lead to Ryugu (the Dragon Palace). The deity of the Yaku Shrine in Miyanoura is Yamayukihiko (Hikohodeminomikoto), and his elder brother Umiyukihiko is enshrined in the shrine across the river. This arrangement of deities directly reflects the island's sense of pairing the blessings of the mountains (wood and water) with the sustenance of the sea (fishing) in the form of myth. According to the story, Yamayuki came to the island in search of his brother's fishhook, climbed Mitake (Mt. Mitake) from Miyanoura, and spent his years hunting deer, thus forming the framework of the story.

Near the coast of Awa, there is a spring called "Tamanoi" or "Menei no mizu," which is said to be the "final entrance to the Dragon Palace. The composition of the gateway down to the undersea palace connected to the spring on land is a good example of the spatial awareness of the islanders who sanctify the boundary between the sea and the freshwater contact point, or the boundary of blessings. This oral tradition overlaps with memories of pre-modern water transportation and coastal trade, and by mythologizing the line of movement from the harbor to the approach to the mountains, life and faith are superimposed on the same map.

The historical background of the power of this tradition is the structure of livelihood on Yakushima. From the early modern period to the modern era, the island was supported by a dual economy of timber and marine products, with mountain and fishermen sharing work according to weather and season. The pairwise concept of "harvests from the sea" and "harvests from the mountains" was not merely a mythological typology, but also a "social memory" of the island that represented the cycle of labor and the ethics of exchange. The fact that seabirds, ears of rice, and kadomatsu pine trees are recited in the same verse in the annual events of Miyanoura and in the poems of the Utagaki and Kadokawari poems is a remnant of the sense of celebrating the good omens of the sea and agriculture in one continuous cycle.

Even after the Meiji period, when the language of "forests = resources" was strengthened by the government-owned forest system, logging, and power development, the island's oral tradition continued to speak of solidarity between the sea and mountains. While reinterpreted in the tourism vocabulary, the dragon palace tradition is linked to signs of springs and shrines, and plays a role in renewing the identity of the region. The island's sense of time, in which the sea and mountains, prayer and livelihood go back and forth, is still alive within this story.