Ugayafukiaezu- Japanese DemigodDemigod"The Cormorant-Feather Prince"

The Unfinished Roof

Toyotama-hime, daughter of the sea god Watatsumi, had followed her husband Hoori from the dragon palace to the surface world. When her labor began, she built a parturition hut on the shore and had it roofed with cormorant feathers. She told Hoori not to look inside during the birth.

Hoori looked. Through the gap in the unfinished thatch, he saw Toyotama-hime in her true form: a great wani, thrashing in the birth chamber. She felt his gaze. The Kojiki records what followed without pause: she bore the child, and then she left. She abandoned the newborn on the shore and returned to the sea, sealing the boundary between land and ocean behind her. The cormorant-feather roof was never completed. The child was named for that fact: Ugayafukiaezu, the Prince of the Unfinished Cormorant-Feather Thatching.

Tamayori-hime

Toyotama-hime could not return, but she sent her younger sister Tamayori-hime to the surface to nurse the child. Tamayori-hime raised Ugayafukiaezu from infancy. She also carried a song from Toyotama-hime, a poem of longing sent across the sealed boundary between sea and land. It is among the oldest poems in the Kojiki.

Tamayori-hime became Ugayafukiaezu's wife. They had four sons. The youngest, Kamuyamato-Iwarebiko, would leave Hyūga in Kyūshū and fight his way east to Yamato. He became Emperor Jimmu, the first emperor. The divine lineage that began with Amaterasu in heaven and passed through Ninigi and Hoori ended with Ugayafukiaezu. His sons were mortal rulers.