The great borrowing from China on the part of the Japanese at this time and the fact that Ennin was on the coast of Shantung after spending the better part of a year in China cast some doubt on the validity of these passages as examples of native Japanese folklore, and we must look to Japanese mythology for evidence that the association of the thunderbolt with stones or stone weapons existed before the period of greatest borrowing from China.
Matsumoto Nobuhiro 松本信廣 in his important study entitled Recherches sur quelques thèmes de la mythologie japonaise (Paris 1928) devotes much attention to thunder deities and has a whole section on “les emblèmes du dieu de tonnerre” (p. 63-70), in which he clearly shows that these are arrows, hoes, lances, and swords.[1] Although three of these are weapons and the fourth an agricultural tool much like a weapon, something more than this is needed to prove that they were in origin stone weapons thought to be thunderbolts and were not simply emblems, as Matsumoto suggests, chosen because of their flashing or cleaving qualities.
The evidence in favor of the stone thunderbolt theory is to be found largely in the names and mythological traditions of certain Japanese shrines, particularly the two associated with the name Isonokami 石上.7a Despite the second character of this name, it is; probable that the kami is not “above” or “upper” but “god” and that the name originally meant “stone-god.” The term “stone-god” cannot be immediately identified with a thunderbolt in Japan, for, since time immemorial, stones have been made into
- ↑ Matsumoto also discusses the series of attributes, water, thunder (storm), and serpents, which belong to Susanoo-no-mikoto 素盞鳴尊, the storm god, and his descendants (59). The association of these three ideas together is only to be expected and is found also throughout China, where the serpent appears as a dragon. Interesting examples of this association are the identification of thunder as a serpent in the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (cf. Matsumoto 54-55 and Aston, Nihongi. Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, 1.347 [London 1896]) and the description in Ennin’s diary of a severe thunderstorm on the Chinese coast as the sound of dragons fighting together and the explanation that such storms were frequent in that vicinity because there were many “dragon palaces” there (year 839, moon 9, day 12 [p. 206]).
7a For a theory concerning the origin of such variant phonetic forms as iso for ishi (stone), cf. S. Yoshitake, The History of the Japanese Particle—“I,” BSOS 5 (1928-30). 889-895.
