| Following creation of Onokoro island and the Shikoku island, the deity couple created a group of smaller islands in the ocean. The group is called Oki-No-Mitsugo-Shima whose alias is Ame-No-Oshikoro-Wake. |
| Now, let's examine some of them in detail. |
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"Oki" is a Japanese word meaning "in the sea" which in Ainu is said [rep]. An ainu expression [rep un] literally means "to be in the sea". Here, an interesting matter is that Ainu has a word [re] for "three" or [rep] for "three pieces". Readers will have seen that if the islands' name was dubbed in Ainu or a language close to Ainu language, it is likely that the name was translated as "three and in the sea". There is an island Rebun island away from Hokkaido's north-west coast. The name is considered to mean an island in the sea, [rep un shir]. Thus, I have cooncluded that the 3-islands in the sea mentioned in Kojiki was originally called [rep un shir], translated into Japanese. When the translation was made, the meaning was not clear whether "in the sea" should be adopted or "three" should be adopted. Old people decided to call both. The group of the islands is identified as the islands away the coast of Shimane prefecture. The group actually consists of four major islands, one bigger Tougo and three-island sub-group of Tozen; and plus several much smaller islands. A traditional explanation has been that the big Tougo is the parents and the three smallers are the children. Wait a minute! This story is telling land creation of the diety couple, Izanagi and Izanami.
My recent findings are about the alias, Ame-No-Oshikoro-Wake. Traditional interpretations have been that Ame means the Heaven, No is a suffix to make possessive of the preceding word, Oshikoro means "(to be) many" (ohosi) "to solidify" (koro) and Wake meaning a branch of a family. My point is about "Oshikoro". As seen above, the traditional interpretation reads this as "many solidify". However, while "ohosi" indeed means "many", it is in the ending mode, as in "something is ohosi (many)". The word is not used as in "ohosi (many) something". I am proposing that Oshikoro derives from [uos kor], meaning "bear (or make) one after another. There is another use of "Oshi", which is in an alias for Chika-no-Shima that is also a group of 5 major islands. The alias in whole is Ame-No-Oshiwo. The last syllable "wo" is written in a Chinese character representing a male person. My interpretation is that [uos kor] (make sequentially) was taken as [uos kur]. [kur] means a person, usually male; among other meanings.
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