Futodama- Japanese GodDeity"Ancestor of the Imbe Clan"

The Rock Cave

When Amaterasu withdrew into the Heavenly Rock Cave and the world went dark, the assembled gods devised a ritual to lure her out. Futodama prepared the offerings. He decorated a sakaki branch with magatama jewels and cloth streamers and held it aloft while Ame-no-Koyane, standing beside him, recited the solemn liturgical prayers. One god held the sacred objects. The other spoke the sacred words.

Ame-no-Uzume danced. The gods laughed. Amaterasu, curious, pushed the stone door open and peered out. In that moment, Futodama stretched a shimenawa rope behind her across the entrance to the cave. She could not go back in. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki both name this as Futodama's act. The shimenawa, the rope that marks the boundary between sacred and ordinary space in every Shinto shrine, began here, stretched by his hands across a cave mouth in the dark.

The Imbe Clan

Amaterasu appointed Futodama alongside Ame-no-Koyane to accompany her grandson Ninigi on the heavenly descent to the terrestrial realm. They went down as a pair: Ame-no-Koyane to handle prayer, Futodama to prepare offerings and maintain ritual purity.

Their descendants inherited the division. The Nakatomi clan descended from Ame-no-Koyane. The Imbe clan descended from Futodama. For centuries both clans served at court ceremonies, but the Nakatomi produced the Fujiwara, who rose to political dominance and pushed the Imbe to the margins.

In 807 CE, the Imbe priest Imbe no Hironari wrote the Kogoshūi, a formal protest. He argued that his clan's contributions had been unjustly diminished and that the Imbe tradition preserved authentic ritual knowledge omitted from the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. He traced the Imbe's authority back to Futodama at the rock cave and on the mountain at Takachiho. The protest survives. The rivalry does not. The Imbe faded from court life, but the Kogoshūi remains one of the few texts that tells their side.