Ōkuchi-no-Magami (大口真神, Oinu-sama)
The wolf deity of Mount Mitake, turned to against evil and against theft.
Ōkuchi-no-Magami is a wolf, and Musashi Mitake Shrine says so plainly: the oinu-sama it is known for is the Japanese wolf, not a dog. Its account is that a white wolf guided Yamato Takeru when he lost his way in the mountains, and that he told it to remain there and destroy all demons. From about the 1830s the deity was widely turned to for warding off evil and preventing theft, and the guardian figures at the shrine's main hall are wolves rather than the Chinese lions found almost everywhere else. The Japanese wolf is now held to be extinct; the shrine notes that until relatively recently wolves and people lived alongside each other on the mountain, feared and at the same time valued for eating the animals that spoiled the fields.
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