They cast a rope,
and hauled the land in.

In 733, during the Nara period, the imperial court ordered every province to compile a regional gazetteer known as a "fudoki." Most provincial fudoki have since been lost or survive only in fragments, but the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki is the sole exception among surviving fudoki to come down to us in an almost complete form — an extraordinarily valuable historical source.

The text methodically records, district by district, the origins of place names, local products, and lists of shrines. Yet right at the very start, in the entry for Ou District, before any of that begins, comes the Kunibiki myth introduced here. That such a grand myth opens what is otherwise a practical gazetteer says a great deal about how Izumo chose to tell the story of its own origins.

The myth begins with the god Yatsukamizu-omitsuno thinking, "The land of Izumo was made too small — like a narrow strip of cloth. Then let us sew more onto it and make it larger." So the god looked out across the sea for any land that seemed to have room to spare, and whenever he found a stretch, he cast a thick rope around it and slowly hauled it in, chanting "Kuniko, kuniko" — "Come, land, come."

Four stretches of land were pulled in this way. The land drawn from "the cape of Silla" became "Kizuki no Misaki"; further land came from "Sakinokuni of Kitado," "Yonaminokuni of Kitado," and from "the three capes of Tsutsu in Koshi." The very rope used to haul the land in is said to have become landforms of its own — Sono no Nagahama, and what is now Yumigahama (Yomi Island). And the stakes driven into the ground to anchor the pulling became what are today Mt. Sanbe and Mt. Daisen.

The land described in the Kunibiki myth roughly corresponds to the present-day Shimane Peninsula and its surroundings. This correspondence has led some to note, from a geomorphological perspective, that the peninsula may once have been a separate island (or several separate landmasses) divided from the mainland by Lake Shinji and Nakaumi, before gradually being connected to the mainland through the accumulation of sandbars over time.

Many readers have been drawn to the idea that the myth's imagery of "pulling the land in and stitching it together" may be a mythic retelling of the actual, long, slow process by which several separate landmasses merged into one. There is also a folk etymology tying the name "Izumo" itself to the idea of having "pulled (i) the land and accomplished (ofu) it."

The grand land of Izumo described in the Kunibiki myth has also yielded a great many actual ancient artifacts. Chief among them, a vast cache of bronzeware found beneath a rice-paddy footpath in the 1980s was a discovery that rewrote Japan's ancient history itself. From mythic Izumo to archaeological Izumo — let's trace the story of Kojindani and Kamo-iwakura.