Amaterasu

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The light returns each morning over the islands because a quarrel in heaven was once mended with a dance. That, at least, is the order of things as the oldest written records of the country tell it: the sun is a person, a great kami, and her shining is an act of will that was withdrawn once and given back. Amaterasu-Ōmikami — the name unfolds as the great august kami who shines in heaven, from amateru, to illuminate the sky — is not a symbol standing in for the sun. Within the frame of the kami world she is the sun, and she is the eldest ancestor of the line that came to hold the throne.

Born of the eye

Her genealogy begins in an act of cleansing. The creator-pair Izanagi and Izanami had brought forth the islands and a host of kami, until Izanami died in giving birth to fire and went down to Yomi, the land of the dead. Izanagi followed her there, recoiled from the corruption he found, and fled back to the world of the living. To wash off the pollution of that place he went down to the water and performed misogi, the purification by bathing that remains a living rite. As he cleansed his left eye, Amaterasu was born; from his right eye came Tsukuyomi, the moon; from his nose, Susanoo, the kami of storm and sea. The three are named together in the Kojiki (the Records of Ancient Matters, completed in 712) and the Nihon Shoki (the Chronicles of Japan, 720) as the noble children, the most precious of all Izanagi’s offspring.

To each Izanagi gave a domain. He set Amaterasu over Takamagahara, the Plain of High Heaven, hanging round her neck the string of curved jewels by which the rule was conferred; the night realm went to Tsukuyomi, the seas to Susanoo. From the first she is the senior and the ruler, not one sun among many but the governing brightness of the cosmos. Here a careful reader should mark the nature of the source. The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were not neutral chronicles. Both were imperially commissioned, compiled by and for the Yamato court (see the Yamato people) precisely to set its descent in order, and the genealogy that runs from Amaterasu down to the throne is the charter of a ruling house, not a record assembled from disinterested memory. The two texts disagree even among themselves — the Nihon Shoki offers the birth of the three as the ordinary issue of Izanagi and Izanami, beside the eye-and-nose account it shares with the Kojiki. The myth is rendered here as the tradition holds it; the political distance of the documents is held alongside it.

The cave and the dance

The central episode of her story is a withdrawal and a return. Susanoo, before departing for the sea, came up to heaven to take leave of his sister, and the meeting curdled into rivalry and then into outrage. In the version the Kojiki sets down, the storm-kami broke the divisions between the rice paddies, fouled the hall of first-fruits, and at last flung a flayed horse through the roof of the sacred weaving hall where Amaterasu and her women sat at the loom, killing one of the weavers. The catalog of offenses is exact and deliberate; the tradition would later name these the heavenly transgressions, the archetype of pollution against which purification is set. (Susanoo’s own arc — exile, the slaying of the eight-headed serpent, the sword drawn from its tail — belongs to Susanoo.)

Affronted and grieving, Amaterasu shut herself inside Ama-no-Iwato, the rock-cave of heaven, and rolled a stone across its mouth. With the sun hidden the High Plain of Heaven and the central land of reeds below fell into unbroken night, and with the dark came every calamity, the voices of a myriad evil kami filling the world like summer flies. The eight hundred myriad kami — the conventional figure for the uncountable host — gathered in the dry bed of the heavenly river to take counsel. The plan was devised by Omoikane, the kami of thought. They set long-crowing birds to call; they forged from the iron of a heavenly mountain a great mirror, the Yata-no-Kagami, the eight-span mirror, and strung curved jewels; they uprooted a five-hundred-branched sakaki tree and hung from it the jewels, the mirror, and streamers of cloth, and stood it before the cave.

Then Ame-no-Uzume, the kami of mirth, took the stage. She bound up her sleeves with a cord of heavenly vine, crowned herself with vine and bamboo-grass, overturned a tub and stamped upon it until it resounded, and danced — a dance that fell, as the Kojiki says without flinching, into divine possession, her dress disarrayed, until the assembled kami roared with laughter and the High Plain of Heaven shook with it. From within the cave Amaterasu wondered aloud how Uzume could dance and the myriad kami laugh while heaven and earth lay in darkness. Uzume answered that they rejoiced because a kami greater than herself was present. As she spoke the others held up the mirror, and Amaterasu, drawn by the unfamiliar radiance of her own face, opened the door a little to look. The strong-armed kami Ame-no-Tajikara-o, waiting at the side, seized her hand and drew her out, and a rope was stretched across the mouth so she could not return. The world filled again with light.

“Iwato kagura no kigen” (Origin of the Sacred Dance at the Rock Door), Shunsai Toshimasa, 1887, nishiki-e woodblock triptych. Public domain (PD-Art / PD-Japan), via Wikimedia Commons.

The episode is more than a tale of an eclipse rescued. The tradition reads in it the founding pattern of kagura, the sacred dance, and behind kagura the deep structure of festival itself: the kami withdraws or is hidden, the community gathers, and through performance, mirth, and the lure of a beautiful object the presence is drawn back into the world. Every shrine dance that summons a kami before its people repeats, in this reading, the first dance before the cave; the kagura performed to this day at the Takachiho district, where one stream of tradition places the cave, still re-enacts the night the sun came out. The episode also fixes three objects at the center of the cult — the mirror, the jewels, and, gathered to them later, the sword — that will become the regalia of the throne.

It is worth noting what kind of religious world this is. The kami are not gods set over against the world in a separate heaven; they are the charged presences within it — the sun, the storm, the rice in the field, the mountain, the ancestor — and the generative, binding force the tradition calls musubi runs through the whole. Amaterasu is supreme among them not as a creator who made the rest from nothing but as the senior and governing brightness, first among the eight hundred myriad. The myriad gather and deliberate; even the sun can be affronted, can grieve, can hide. The cosmos of the Kojiki is one in which divinity is plural, social, and answerable, and in which the right response to a withdrawn presence is not argument but rite. Whether any of this was understood, before the medieval and modern eras, as a single bounded religion called Shintō is itself contested; the term and the bounded concept are substantially a later construct laid over a far older and more diffuse worship of kami.

The mirror at Ise

When the kami of heaven set out to bring the central land under their order, they first sent down envoys to negotiate its surrender. The land below was held by Ōkuninushi, the kami who had made and settled it (his story is told at Ōkuninushi). In the episode called the kuni-yuzuri, the ceding of the land, the heavenly kami pressed their claim until Ōkuninushi agreed to yield the visible country to Amaterasu’s line, withdrawing into the unseen realm in exchange for a great shrine to himself at Izumo (see Izumo Taisha). Only then did Amaterasu send down her grandson Ninigi to rule. This descent, the tenson kōrin, is the hinge of the whole imperial myth. She placed in Ninigi’s keeping the three sacred objects — the Yata-no-Kagami, the curved jewel Yasakani-no-Magatama, and the sword Kusanagi recovered from the serpent’s tail — and charged him to regard the mirror as her very spirit and to worship it as he would worship her. From Ninigi the line is traced through to Jimmu, counted in the chronicles as the first earthly sovereign. Whether Jimmu was a historical person is not a claim the documentary record can carry; he belongs to the legendary stratum the court set down as its origin.

The mirror is the thread that ties the myth to a place still standing. Tradition holds that the Yata-no-Kagami was carried for generations within the palace until the princess Yamatohime, searching for a worthy seat, was led to the wooded banks of the Isuzu River in the province of Ise, where Amaterasu consented to dwell. There the Inner Shrine, the Naikū, was raised to her, and the mirror is kept within it as her shintai — the object in which the kami is present, her body in the world, seen by no one. The whole sanctuary at Ise is built around that hidden presence.

The Naikū (Inner Shrine) of Ise, dedicated to Amaterasu. Photograph by N yotarou, 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ise’s most striking observance is a measure of how the cult understands permanence. Every twenty years the shrine buildings — the main sanctuaries of the Inner and Outer Shrines and the bridge that crosses to them — are torn down and built again, identical, on the adjoining plot, the kami carried in solemn procession to the fresh timber. This is the shikinen sengū, the periodic rebuilding. The first ceremonial reconstruction is recorded under Empress Jitō in 692, after her husband Emperor Tenmu instituted the practice in the late seventh century; the cycle has run, with interruptions, ever since, the rebuilding of 2013 counted as the sixty-second, the next set for 2033. Permanence here is not the survival of old wood but the unbroken renewal of the form — freshness, tokowaka, the ever-young, held to be proper to the sun. Nearby stands the Outer Shrine, the Gekū, dedicated to Toyouke, the kami of grain and provision who is said to have been summoned to attend Amaterasu and to provide her sacred food.

The descent made into a charter

For most of recorded Japanese history Amaterasu was at once the goddess of the imperial cult and a presence woven into the wider kami world, and that world did not stand apart from the buddhas. For roughly a thousand years kami and buddhas were honored together in a single devotional field, under the interpretive scheme of honji-suijaku: the kami understood as local traces or manifestations of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, the eternal ground showing itself in the soil of the islands. Within that frame Amaterasu was at times identified with the cosmic Buddha Dainichi, the Great Sun of the esoteric schools (the tradition treated in Shingon esoteric Buddhism), the two suns folded into one. To picture a “pure Shinto” cleansed of the buddhas in those centuries is to read a later condition back onto a syncretic past.

That later condition was made, not found. With the Meiji Restoration of 1868 the new state issued the shinbutsu bunri, the order separating kami from buddhas, prying apart what a millennium of practice had joined; in its wake came haibutsu kishaku, a wave of anti-Buddhist destruction in which temples, images, and texts were smashed at shrine precincts across the country. On the cleared ground the state assembled what scholars call State Shinto, Kokka Shintō — administered from 1868 and dismantled in 1945 — in which the shrines were reorganized under government control and the emperor’s descent from Amaterasu was made the axis of national doctrine. The unbroken line from the sun-goddess, set down in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, became kokutai, the doctrine of a divinely founded national body centered on a sovereign of heavenly blood. By the early twentieth century the divinity of the emperor as Amaterasu’s descendant was taught in the schools, and over a hundred thousand shrines were ranked under a state bureau. The descent that had been a dynasty’s charter was made the charter of a nation arming for empire, and was carried to war on those terms through 1945.

This deployment must be marked and held apart from the older shrine tradition. The sun-goddess of Ise, worshipped for more than a millennium, is not reducible to the apparatus that the modern state built from her genealogy; the apparatus was a particular construction with a particular history and end. That history closed in defeat. The occupation’s Shinto Directive of December 1945 stripped the shrines of state support and ended State Shinto as an official cult, and on the first day of 1946 the emperor issued the rescript later called the Ningen Sengen, the Humanity Declaration, repudiating the conception of the sovereign as a manifest deity ruling a people destined to rule others. The renunciation was carefully bounded — scholars have noted that the rescript denied the emperor was an akitsumikami, a manifest kami, without disturbing the claim of descent from Amaterasu herself, which it left untouched.

Light still asked for

Detached from the state, the cult of Amaterasu did not end; it returned to the shrines. Ise remains the senior sanctuary of the kami world and a place of pilgrimage drawing millions, the Inner Shrine still rebuilt on its cycle, the mirror still unseen at its heart. The household amulets distributed from Ise reach a large share of Japanese homes, and the rites of the imperial house — the enthronement observances above all — still turn on the regalia and on the goddess from whom they descend. The afterlife of the wartime fusion remains a live wound at one site in particular: the shrine of Yasukuni, founded in 1869 to enshrine the spirits of the war dead, became after the secret enshrinement of convicted Class-A war criminals in 1978 the focus of a controversy over official visits that has not subsided, and that no emperor has resolved by attendance. The matter is charged and is left here as fact, without verdict.

To render Amaterasu only as a personification of a star, an early people’s attempt to explain the dawn, is to miss what the tradition has always held and still holds. Within its own frame she is no metaphor. She is the sun in the only sense that matters — a kami who shines by an act of presence, who was once persuaded back into the world by laughter and a mirror, and from whom both the light over the islands and the order of rule are understood to flow. The festival dancers who lure the kami before the gathered people are not staging an old story; they are doing again the thing first done before the rock-cave, on the understanding that the light is given, and may be asked for, and comes.

The torii of Itsukushima Shrine at dusk; the gate marks the passage into kami space. Photograph by Rdsmith4, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

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