Susanoo is the tradition's clearest evidence that its figures are not tidied. His offences against Amaterasu are catalogued in the Kojiki without euphemism, he is stripped of his beard and fingernails and expelled from heaven, and he then immediately becomes the hero of the serpent story and the founder of a line. He is the ancestral figure of Izumo, the alternative centre to Yamato, and his cult at Yasaka in Kyoto began as a plague-quelling rite: the Gion Matsuri, now the most famous festival in Japan, was instituted in 869 in response to an epidemic, sending sixty-six halberds for the sixty-six provinces. A kami of violence and disorder becomes the kami you address about disease, which is consistent with the tradition's general logic that the force that can wreck you is the one worth having on your side.