indeed appear the Yata-garasu flying down from the Void. The Emperor said:—"The coming of this crow is in due accordance with my auspicious dream. How grand! How splendid! My Imperial ancestor, Ama-terasu no Oho-kami, desires therewith to assist me in creating the hereditary institution."[1]
At this time Hi no Omi[2] no Mikoto, ancestor of the (III. 12.) Oho-tomo[3] House, taking with him Oho-kume[4] as commander of the main body, guided by the direction taken by the crow, looked up to it and followed after, until at length they arrived at the district of Lower Uda. Therefore they named the place which they reached the village of Ukechi[5] in Uda.
- ↑ The sovereignty.
- ↑ Hi means sun; Omi, minister.
- ↑ Oho-tomo means "great companion." The Oho-tomo were the Imperial guards.
- ↑ Oho-kume, as Chamberlain points out, probably means simply a great force. But when the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" were written, this meaning was forgotten, and it was supposed to be a man's name.
- ↑ Ugatsu means to pierce, and the name was given because they penetrated the mountains to this place. All these derivations are very fanciful.
that the Yang-wu or Sun-crow is in Japanese yata-garasu. The Yang-wu is a bird with three claws, and of a red colour, which, according to Chinese myth, inhabits the sun. 
Sun-crow.If we accept this identification, the meaning of the epithet yata becomes clear. It means eight hands, or, as ya in ancient Japanese meant also many or several, many hands, a sufficiently accurate description for popular myth of the Yang-wu with its three claws. The late M. Terrien de La-Couperie, in his "Western Origin of Early Chinese Civilization," says that "the first allusion to the three-legged crow supposed to roost in the sun occurs in the "Li Sao" of Kiü-yuen, the poet of Ts'u, 314 B.C. in China. A three-legged bird in various forms was figured on coins of Pamphylia and Lycia of older times. Comte Goblet d'Alviella has reproduced some of them in his interesting work on "La Migration des Symboles," 1891, p. 222. See a paper on the Hi no maru in "T.A.S.J.," Vol. XXII., p. 27, and Ch. K., p. 136. The guidance of conquerors or colonists to their destination by a supernatural bird or beast is a familiar feature of old-world story. See Lang, "Custom and Myth," II., 71.
