Sea of Trees

Question: How would you mythically run Japan's suicide forest, Aokigahara? I think It could be used as a portal to Yomi.

What a neat question! For those who haven't run into this bit of Japanese folklore, Aokigahara is a forest around the base of Mount Fuji that is deep, old, unnaturally silent, filled with the remains of ancient volcanic activity and heavily associated with death and suicide. It's one of the most popular places in the world for people to attempt suicide, with an estimated fifty to two hundred people killing themselves in it per year and double that making the attempt (at our best guess, anyway - the government of Japan doesn't like to give concrete numbers anymore because it just encourages more potential suicides to beeline for the place). And while the traditional association of the place with suicide has only really been tracked in the past several decades, the forest's been connected to the idea of death for centuries, and is believed to be one of the places that ancient Japanese people abandoned their elderly community members in times of hardship to die alone instead of taxing the rest of the peoples' resources.

There's actually a story seed regarding Aokigahara in Scion: Demigod on page 113, but there are plenty of options out there for other things to do with it as well. If you'd like to connect the mortal forest with the supernatural very directly, it's a perfect location in the World to connect to a Terra Incognita, most likely some kind of dangerous forest of death and suicide, even one connected to other mythic forests such as the Norse Mirkwood or the Wood of Suicides from Dante's Inferno.

While we think you could use it as a portal to Yomi if you really wanted to, we'd probably avoid it, simply because Yomi is traditionally hard to get into or out of (out of necessity, because we don't want Izanami rolling up in the land of the living), so more doors into the place are not necessarily better. But it is reputed to be haunted to the gills by the souls of all the mortals who have killed themselves there, so even if you don't use it as a direct door to the Underworld, it may still be full of the dead who for some reason find themselves trapped there (due to Titanic interference? some death god's influence? something even weirder?) or even be on its way to turning into an Underworld itself if some enterprising Scion with a penchant for Death happens to come along and lay claim to it.

It's also a good site for breakthroughs from Titanrealms, if that's something you're interested in seeing. If you're using a Titanrealm of Death (like Xibalba in our Maya supplement or Mrtyu in the French supplements from Biblioteque Interdite), Aokigahara is a natural place for such a realm to break through into the World; and while the death connections are strong, so is the place's ancient forest setting, making Terra or Ourea another possibility.

And even if you don't make the wood itself anything special, it looks like a perfect home base for Titanspawn who would likely be drawn to the nasty vibrations and free buffet of a bunch of mortals losing their lives. There are tons of possibilities to suit all kinds of games, so go to town with your favorites!

Ritual Flame

Question: Okay, there's one thing I've never understood and maybe you can explain it. Fire is a big deal in the Japanese religion, but no gods of the Amatsukami have it associated... why not?

Largely because of the reasons why fire is important in Shinto practice. While some religions revere fire, most Japanese practices involving it are dedicated to overcoming and controlling it, because it's conceived of as a dangerous force that must be bound and restrained. Traditional Japanese religion doesn't conceive of fire as something worthy of worship, but rather as a natural force that threatens the world unless harnessed for good purposes (like cooking, providing warmth and so on).

There is a Japanese god associated with fire: Kagutsuchi, the kami of flame and volcanic eruption, who killed his mother with his arrival into the world and was in turn put down by his father. This is a symbolic story on a number of levels, but the most important is that Izanagi, by killing and chopping Kagutsuchi up into separate components, manages to conquer and subdue fire rather than allowing it to run rampant. Order, in the person of the heavenly father Izanagi, overcomes the dangerous and chaotic power of fire in the person of Kagutsuchi, which thereafter can only occasionally threaten the universe. Had he not been conquered, the subtext implies, everything would probably have been burned in a great conflagration, or at least the world would be a lot more unpleasant and prone to flash fires than it is now. The variant of the story in which Izanami also uses her dying moments to give birth to Mizuhame, the kami of water, also underscores this point; the powers of the universe must create water in order to prevent fire from getting out of control.

Shinto's exceptionally strong emphasis on ritual means that things like the control of fire and the bending of it to human uses are repeated over and over again, emphasizing the religion's unwritten law that as long as you keep up with its rituals, the universe will remain in the correct order. Things like fire ceremonies and coal-walking are rituals specifically designed to repeat, re-emphasize and re-establish control of the faithful priests and worshipers of Shinto over the naturally dangerous force of fire, rendering it benevolent - or if not that, at least subdued - for a while longer.

But the gods themselves aren't really involved in that process; because Shinto is a very segmented religion, in which the rituals of mankind, the worship of the kami and the actions of the kami themselves are not always related, the gods have no need to repeat all this control of fire stuff that their worshipers are still doing. They already did that on a cosmic scale when Kagutsuchi was dismembered; from their divine perspective, the problem is solved and fire is successfully lidded and harnessed. Therefore, the ancient Japanese had no need for any of the kami they worshiped to be in charge of fire, because fire is already covered, belonging to Kagustuchi who has in turn already been prevented by his parents from doing any irredeemable harm to the world. Fire's not something they considered a necessary facet of their gods and it's not something they were interested in worshiping for its own sake, so none of the kami are associated with it. Essentially, Shintoism has no need of fire gods other than Kagutsuchi, so it doesn't have any.

It's especially interesting to contrast the Shinto fire rituals with those of cultures that perceive fire much more positively - the Yazata, whose religion considers fire a purifying agent that cleanses the world and is closer than any other element to the gods, are a good example. Ancient Persian worshipers held fire ceremonies because they believed that the flame itself was sacred and brought them closer to the gods, while ancient Japanese worshipers held vigiliant fire ceremonies as part of their contribution to conquering what they saw as a dangerous and fractious element.

And therefore the Yazata have a couple of fire gods, and the Amatsukami have none; the importance of the element in their religious practices is for different reasons and therefore manifests differently when it comes to the associations of the pantheon that oversees that religion.