CW:  This episode deals with ancient Japanese stories that contain depictions of sex, misogyny, and death.

The Chronicles of Japan finally get into the Japanese Chronicles!  This episode starts our foray into the Japanese Chronicles:  The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, with a look at what's behind the Chronicles and one of the first real stories:  The creation of the archipelago and the kami, or gods, of Heaven.

We'll start with a discussion of the main chronicles for this time and go on to discuss the story of Izanagi and Izanami, the two gods who are said to have created Japan and are the progenitors of most of the later kami.  We'll examine all of this and look at some of the possible cultural information that can be gleaned from these stories.

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-14

Rough Transcript

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 14: The Japanese Chronicles

In the beginning, the world was void, with only clumps of primordial substance floating on the oily surface of the water. Izanagi and Izanami stood upon the Bridge of Heaven, gazing down at the oceans.  Wondering if there was any land, they took the Spear of Heaven and plunged it into the waters, which swirled and congealed upon the tip.  That congealed matter became Onogoro Island, a small island in what would become the Seto Inland Sea.  It was here that Izanagi and Izanami came and built their house and gave birth to the other islands and the gods of Heaven.

That is the basic description given for the creation of the first piece of land that would eventually become Japan.  The actual text differs somewhat depending on the source and is traditionally preceded by the creation of the initial kami.

Alright, so this episode we are diving into some of the less historical parts in the native Japanese records.  We’ll look at the accounts of the kami—the gods of Japan—in the early Chronicles.  These are the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, known collectively as the Kiki—which is basically just the last character of the name of each chronicle put together.  By the way, quick shout out to the Nihon Shoki because as we are recording this it is just turning 1300 years old, so Happy Birthday!  That’s right, it was completed and submitted to the court in 720 and we are recording in 2020, so 1300 years ago.  It came a few years after the Kojiki, and is believed to have been compiled by the same author, O no Yasumaro.  In the case of the Kojki, Yasumaro was apparently just transcribing the oral history being recited by Hieda no Are, who had been tasked with memorizing the stories of the Imperial lineage several decades prior.  The Nihon Shoki, on the other hand, appears to be the compilation of extant written records.

By the way, content warning right up front on this on:  The Kojiki is often lewd and vulgar in its descriptions of sex, violence, and other matters, and this may include some rather racy tales.  The Nihon Shoki, takes a slightly more technical approach, but there are still some things that modern listeners may find objectionable.  I will do my best to ensure there is a warning up front at each episode, but I just want to make sure everyone is aware.  Today, we’ll mostly talk about the context of these Chronicles and then we will talk about the Japanese Creation story.  And like many such tales it is going to deal primarily with procreation, aka sex.  However, this was also a patriarchal society, and we’ll be running into those attitudes in this as well.

Before we dive into that stuff, though, let’s make sure we have our context.

Now these Chronicles weren’t the oldest histories written down, but they are the oldest ones still extant.  The earliest was probably a set of records compiled around 620, and said to have been presented by the famous (and possibly fictional) Shotoku Taishi, and saved from a fire during a coup d’etat in 645, and it is possible that there were other copies or early drafts which may have fed into the stories of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki.  There are also a few later accounts that can be looked at for clues.  Things like the Fudoki and the Kogo Shui, which were written later but may contain some stories or details that the chroniclers just didn’t think was important for their purposes.  There is also the Kujiki, which John Bentley believes was written in the 8th century, but other scholars place in in the 9th or 10th.  Early Japanese scholars thought it was the original National History rescued from that fire in 645.  Bentley doesn’t go quite that far, but does suggest it as another important early historical text.  I will try to bring it into the conversation where appropriate.

This means that all of this is being written down several centuries after Queen Himiko and her time.  The first part of the narrative that some consider to be “historical”, though, was probably from around her time, which is why I wanted to dig into this, now.  To bring us up to speed, we’ll get through the early parts of the narratives and then do our best to match up what is going on in the Chronicles with what we know from archaeological and continental historical sources.

Now it is important, here, to understand some of the background and what was happening just prior to and during the composition of these early Chronicles.  You see, in the late 7th century, Prince Ohoama, also known as Ama no Nunahara Oki no Mabito, the brother of the reigning sovereign, who was posthumously known as Tenji Tennou.  According to the chronicles, he had originally been named Crown Prince—it was actually quite common for a brother to inherit a position—but when his brother died he was passed over in favor of Tenji Tenno’s young son, and Prince Ohoama does not seem to have been pleased with this outcome, and he gathered supporters to press his claim.  The resulting conflict is known to scholars as the Jinshin War, so called for the name of that year’s place in the sixty year zodiac cycle.  In the end, Prince Ohoama came to power, and is known to us today as Temmu Tennou.

And it is no wonder that, once he had power, Temmu would want to solidify his position.  After all, if he had just raised up an army and taken the throne, then what was to prevent someone else from doing the same?  This was one movie that didn’t need a sequel.  He would need to ensure that there were no questions as to legitimacy, and one of the ways of doing that was to take control of the narrative.  In Himiko’s time she had appealed to the authority of the Chinese court to legitimize her rule, but this was different.  By now, the rights of the imperial family to rule had been linked to the divine, and I have no doubt that it was important that the history be “correct” to ensure that nobody could make counter-claims against Temmu’s dynasty.

That is probably at least part of the impetus behind the action in 681, when Temmu brought together twelve members of the imperial family and other court nobles in his Great Hall of Audience and ordered them to commit to writing a chronicle of the Emperors and matters of High Antiquity.  This may have also been the time when he ordered Hieda no Are to commit to memory the narrative that would eventually become the Kojiki, as well.  There is no official mention of Hieda no Are, nor anyone like them, in the Chronicles other than the preface to the Kojiki, so we don’t know just when Are was commissioned.  Neither effort is recorded as being completed before Temmu passed away 5 years later in 686,  but only 5 years after that—a full decade since the first order—his wife and successor, Jito Tenno, would issue a command that the various families submit their ancestral records, probably to add to the continuing work of compiling a complete history.

For all of this work, it wasn’t until 712 that the first of these efforts would make its way into a printed version presented to the court.  This would be the Kojiki, which was O no Yasumaro’s transcription of the imperial history as recited by Hieda no Are. In his introduction, Yasumaro records that Temmu Tenno lamented the fact that the Imperial Chronicles and the records of the various houses had lost their veracity.  No doubt, as we see, they had conflicts, but I think it is just as likely that they didn’t quite fit the truth that Tenmu wanted to have told.  So he had Hieda no Are learn these to recite them back, but she hadn’t finished before Temmu Tennou passed away.

So let’s tease this apart:  Hieda no Are was told by Temmu to study and memorize the history when Are was 28 years old, but didn’t complete before he passed away.  Aré must have kept at it, up until Yasumaro writes it down, presenting it to the court in 712.  That’s at least 26 years after the death of Temmu—I highly doubt that it took Are 26 years to memorize everything, and it only took Yasumaro roughly 4 months to transcribe it since he was given the commandment by the then sovereign, Gemmei Tenno.

I would suggest that this tells us several things.  First off, oral recitation was still an important part of tradition, and there were professionals, like Hieda no Are, who spent time committing narratives to memory and then reciting them back.  There is even a term, “Kataribe”, for these storytellers. I suspect that there was a certain sacral quality to recitation, either because of the idea of the kotodama, the special sounds made by the words, or simply because it was the continuation of an ancient practice, rather than a foreign one.  This may have had meaning to the people of the time that is hard for us to fully comprehend in modern society.

In fact, among many peoples of the world, oral histories are important, even today.  These often tell the stories of who you are as a people, as a family, and as an individual.  Being someone called upon to recite these stories is a very important, and often sacred duty.  There is great importance placed on getting it right.  These stories aren’t just information, but they are often properties, owned by a people or a family.  Sometimes they aren’t even the property of the person who recites them, and as such, to get something wrong is like going into another person’s house and beating up their grandfather—it can be very serious.  All of this means that people charged with this responsibility have developed a tremendous capacity to store and recite back information.  There are usually telltale signs in the narrative to ensure that it is still being told correctly.  This can be thematic elements, like things coming in pairs, or threes, or similarly matched.  It may be linguistic, with stories being recited as poetry, with rhyme and meter. 

I suspect that Are’s account was never intended to be written down—at least not by Temmu Tenno.  It was probably meant to be passed on as a continued oral teaching—Hieda no Are may have been called upon to recite the stories, from time to time, and I wonder if it didn’t have a quality not dissimilar to the recitation of Buddhist scripture or Shinto norito.  Recitations may have been part of the continuing reinforcement of the imperial legitimacy.  This might have been a regular occurrence at the court through the reigns of Jito, Monmu, and then Genmei. 

Second, from the reign of Jito through that of her son, Monmu, the nation was concerned with the formulation of the Ritsuryo law codes, and the work of the court scribes—any not dealing with the day-to-day administration of the government—would have been largely bent towards this task, so it is unlikely that much attention was being paid to the furthering of a national history, beyond the basic court records themselves.

Third, by 710, the court had finished building Heijo-kyo, in present day Nara.  It was the second purpose-built Chinese style capital—like an 8th century Canberra.  This would have been a monumental undertaking, and I suspect that it was only one aspect of what Genmei was doing.  Not only was she continuing the actions of the Temmu and Jito Tenno, but she was, herself, the daughter of Fujiwara Fuhito—scion of a recently created noble family; the Fujiwara were still new on the scene, but through intermarriage, such as Genmei herself, they would eventually become directly connected to the imperial house.  I believe this may be part of why she asked O no Yasumaru to have the account transitioned from an oral to a written record.

Not satisfied with just the Kojiki, though, in 713, Genmei put out a request to the provinces to provide a survey—the fudoki, or gazetteers. Then, after this, in 714, she commissioned Ki no Kiyondo and Miyake no Fujimaro to compile a new National History.  So she was continuing the work of collecting the information and requesting it be compiled.

Five years later, in 720 the Nihon Shoki would be presented to court, but not to Genmei—she abdicated later in 715—but to her daughter, Gensho, though Genmei still would have been around to see it.  At this time, the work of the Nihon Shoki was under the direction of Prince Toneri, the third and only living son of Temmu Tenno, and it is thought that O no Yasumaro had a hand in this manuscript as well.

Now, in contrast to the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki appears to be assembled directly from various textual sources, made up of various records of the court, including the genealogies of not just the imperial family, but also of various other powerful noble houses.  Unlike the Kojiki there is no preface explaining when or why it was compiled, and it has much more detailed content, including years that the Kojiki doesn’t cover.  You see, the Kojiki (as well as the document we have that calls itself the Kujiki) only covers the years through to Suiko Tenno, in the mid-7th century, though realistically it ends anything other than lists of “begats” from about Muretsu in the early 6th century.  Given that the original history, said to have been submitted by the famous Shotoku Taishi, was presented in about 620.  The Nihon Shoki, however, contains entries all the way up through the year 697, ending about 5 years before the death of Jito Tenno, the successor to her husband, Temmu Tennou.  They didn’t update it to Gensho’s era—possibly for political reasons, but also possibly because there were still sufficient people around who remembered the past two decades, and so they didn’t consider that “history”.

Now, compared to the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki is much more wholly a Chinese work—that is, not only was it written in Chinese, which was the language of learning and scholarship, much like Greek or Latin in Medieval Europe, but it often borrows Chinese concepts and explanations, such as that of Yin and Yang.  Meanwhile the Kojiki was also written in Chinese characters, but the language is only partially Chinese, interspersed as it is not only with Japanese words, but also sections arranged with a bias to Japanese sentence structure and other native influences, likely because it was an attempt to transcribe a spoken, rather than written, narrative. 

The Nihon Shoki also has a much more laminated feel to it, compared to the Kojiki, at least in the earlier sections.  Along with a main thread, there are also sections that are identified as coming from other works, basically other versions of the same stories.  We aren’t quite sure if these were included in the manuscript presented in 720, or if they were added as later commentary, but many scholars concur that if they were added later it was close to the time of the original presentation.  Given how many of these alternate versions of the stories there are, I can’t help but think that they must have already been largely written, at the very least—possibly some of the stories that were only found in one or two accounts, and therefore not considered quite as reliable, or which differed from the official line, but were too well known to be discounted entirely.  For us, these sometimes conflicting narratives give us multiple perspectives by which we can, ourselves, attempt to determine things about what we are reading.  For example, in the story of Amaterasu and the Heavenly Cave, it is instructive in which kami are given which tasks, since they are specifically called out as the ancestral kami of various noble houses.  Different takes on the story could be used to justify a particular house’s status and precedence at court.

This all leads to the narrative sometimes being a bit confused, with different stories stitched together in a new way.  In some cases it feels natural, like Alien v. Predator.  Clearly they come from similar narrative cycles, even if they were maybe crammed together for a particular story that wasn’t quite as great as the others.  But then other times it feels more like Luke Skywalker going to Hogwarts to learn how to be an Avenger, with different stories being woven together to try to achieve some kind of cohesive narrative.  Though it might be cool to see Dumbledore team up with Yoda to take on Loki it just doesn’t always make a lot of sense.  I have seen some scholars claim a not dissimilar point about some of the history of the formation of the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva triad found in many vedic-influenced cultures.  They claim that originally these gods were worshiped separately, but that over time their worshippers started to come together, and so did their stories.

Now,  both of these Chronicles clearly have political bias towards those currently in power at the Japanese court, with a cultural bias towards 7th and 8th century Japan.  What do I mean by that?

Well, let’s take a look at Medieval Europe and things like the biblical stories, or even the Greek and Roman stories.  Though medieval Europeans may have had the original text, and they knew it happened centuries ago, most depictions were based off of contemporary assumptions.  This is most clearly seen in the art, where you often see people wearing clothing and in situations that would have been familiar to the medieval person—or possibly only a little out of date, with only a few nods to antiquity.  In most cases these would be almost entirely unrecognizable to an actual Roman, Greek, or Galilean.  Similarly, I would guess that in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, these stories, many of which were likely passed down orally, from person to person, until they could be written down, would likely have been slightly modified over time to make sense to contemporary audiences—especially when they were translated into Chinese characters, which would have required at least some interpretation. As social mores changed, the emphasis in various stories might have been pulled along with it. In addition, the court scholars, in an attempt to demonstrate their erudition, would pull from Chinese writings to bolster their own narrative.  Thus there are sections that are lifted whole-cloth from the Chinese histories, sometimes completely out of place.  Therefore you have Japanese sovereigns spouting speeches that can be directly traced to Chinese rulers, and certain things, like chopsticks, showing up hundreds of years before they actually existed or were used.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t hints of earlier customs, but we just have to understand that we can’t always take what we are reading at face value.

So the first part of both the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki are the accounts of the gods—how they came to be and the early stories around them.  I’m going to avoid as much as I can that almost biblical “who begat who” narrative, and I’ll do my best not to inundate you with name upon name of the kami—especially the one-hit wonders that show up once and are gone.  I tend to think that some of this was to try to make sense of the myriad traditions that had grown up and morphed across the islands, but beyond that, this was a tool of legitimacy within the court.  By the 7th century, the sovereigns in Yamato had consolidated their power and control, but there were still plenty of stories that were regionally based.  Through the histories, they could consolidate those stories, and demonstrate Yamato’s quote-unquote “natural” place at the top of the food chain.  Thus, the imperial family is shown as having a direct, unbroken descent from the Sun Goddess herself, Amaterasua—a descent that would lead, in more modern times, to the Emperor being considered a “living god”.

Of course, far from being a unique feature of the imperial household, this idea of claiming descent from the gods was actually a rather common practice.  You see, most of the noble families claimed descent from one deity or another, and how these deities were incorporated—and their proximity to the Imperial line—were all important.  It is just that the Imperial lineage was now given precedence.

But why does this matter to us?

Well, this matters because it gives us some glimpse of what, perhaps, the authors *aren’t* saying as well as what they are.  For instance—it is clear from the get-go that there is a patriarchal perspective on everything.  And yet there are some places where that seems to fall apart.  Most notably is the goddess Amaterasu no Ohomikami, who is given purview of the High Plain of Heaven.  Where would that concept even come from in a patriarchal society?  But if the stories, instead, came from when women and men shared power, then that might help explain things.  And remember, this was being presented to women who were ruling—even if the party line is that they were ruling as regents for their sons who were not yet old enough to rule for themselves.  Likewise, when we get to Susanowo—in some stories he is a bad boy, and an obstacle to be overcome, but in others he is almost a culture hero.  This reminds me of some of the conflict between Indian and Persian mythology, where “deva” can either be an angle or a devil, depending on which side of the cultural divide you are on, apparently a result of ancient animosity between the two cultures.  The dominant culture could not wipe out everything, but they could add new stories that retcon the old, like comic book narratives that turn heroes into villains and villains into heroes—I’m looking at you, Deadpool.  In the case of Susanowo and others, like the popular Okuninushi, we appear to be looking at a myth from Izumo that has been incorporated into the Yamato mythical narrative.

But we can touch on all of that as it comes up.  We’ve spent enough time talking about the Chronicles, but let’s get into the stories.  We’ll start at the beginning, with the creation of the first kami and the islands of Japan.  I’m going to be trying to give you a single narrative throughout, drawing from the various accounts.  I’m not going to try not to spend too much time obsessing over what comes from what source, except where they differ significantly or where it seems particularly relevant to understanding.  I highly recommend that people read through the accounts themselves so that they can better understand the way they all come together.

So at first there is the spontaneous creation of a variety of deities.  The Nihon Shoki starts with yin and yang congealing out of the void, but that is clearly a nod to Chinese cosmology.  I place more importance on the creation of the early kami, and they are literally popping up out of the unformed ground—I’m not kidding!  In the Kojiki there are three Heavenly deities that just come about from the beginning, formed out of the void, but in the Nihon Shoki it starts right away with this:  a shape like a reed-shoot, peeking out of the mud.  This reed becomes a god—the accounts differ on which one, exactly.  You know, I can’t help but find the image of the reed shoot especially intriguing, given what we know of just how intertwined the Yayoi were with agriculture.  And of course the reed shoot, the spear, etc.—even the pillar mentioned later on—it is hard to not see in these a kind of phallic male sexuality.

Whatever the case, most of these kami play very little role in the main storyline, narratively speaking.  Occasionally one of these others will make an appearance as the parent of some later deity, but that’s about it.  A possible exception here might be Takami Musubi and Kamu Musubi, who do show up later on at least as parents of other kami, if not directly involved, themselves.  Personally, I suspect that these deities were remnants of various other cycles, probably important to certain families or places, but which did not easily fit into narratives, elsewhere.  It’s possible that their exploits have been replaced by other, kami, or perhaps they were gods whose stories were largely forgotten, except for their names.  Who knows.

Now from that initial seed there arise 8 generations, coming in pairs as male and female, as well as, oddly enough, husband and wife.  Yeah, there is a bit of implied incest going on here, but what do you want?  They are starting from scratch, and there isn’t anyone else yet.

I really have to wonder about these generations.  Eight is a pretty auspicious number in much of Asia, but largely due to Chinese and Buddhist influence.  In Yin-Yang theory you have the 8 trigrams (and 64 hexagrams), and in Buddhism you have the eightfold path.  Eight could have been chosen as a lucky number and then they just needed to fill in gods to make the math work out.  It is also possibly that 8 meant something more like “many” (we often see this in terms of the “80 deities”), etc.

By the way, this issue about incest gets into something else, where apparently, at least in the Man’yoshu, one of our earliest sources for Japanese language poetry, “Imo”, or “little sister”, was not an uncommon way for a husband to refer to his wife.  Whether or not the brother-sister relationship was a thing, there certainly seems to have been a lot of early male-female pairings.  In many of the fudoki and elsewhere I notice a pattern of paired male and female characters like Aga Hiko and Aga Hime—the Prince and Princess of Aga.  Or even Himiko and her younger brother who was helping him to rule.  Brother and sister, or husband and wife, it strikes me as significant that, at least initially, everything is coming in pairs.  Even the names, Izanagi and Izanami, show evidence of this paired format, with only the terminal morae being different between them.

Finally, we get two the two creator deities: Izanagi and Izanami.

Alright, so as we started out with, Izanagi and Izanami had created Onogoro island.  Supposedly this is Nu island, off the coast of Awaji in the Seto Inland Sea, between Honshu and Shikoku—and due west of Yamato, on the other side of modern Osaka Bay.  It was here that the pair decided to set up shop, and Izanagi decided to show just how smooth he really was.  He was ready to start making the rest of Japan, and so, like a high school boy asking his date out to homecoming he slide up beside her and the conversation went something like this:

“Hey, yo, how are you formed?”

“Why, I have a place where I am empty”

“Yeah, heh, well, I have a place where I stick out.  I want to thrust the part of me that sticks out to fill the part of you that is empty, and create the world.  You cool with that?”

“Sounds good.”

…

So, ummmm…. Yeah, that was it.  That was the conversation, at least according to the Kojiki, with some liberties in the interpretation.  Hey, at least he got consent first.  That’s a good start, right?

The Nihon Shoki is a little less direct, simply talking about “uniting” the feminine and masculine, but we all know what they were talking about.  The basis for so much of human thought and philosophy:  poles and holes. I mean even that whole thing about dipping the spear into the waters? I’m sure Freud would be proud.

So following their agreement to get it on, for the good of the world mind you, they had what I can only describe as a courtship or possibly early marriage ritual.  The two walked around a central heavenly pillar and then greeted one another.

Again, these greetings were pretty straightforward.  Izanami walked around the pillar and met Izanagi, saying “Hey!  Here is a beautiful young man!” and Izanaagi replied “Hey! Here is a beautiful young woman!”—not exactly Shakespearean dialog, but remember, they are just getting started.  It just makes me think of them more as teenagers.  This all feels remarkably relatable, to me. You know, maybe not all the brain cells were firing—after all, they are supposedly just figuring it all out, right?

But then comes a moment that I suspect the women in the audience will find all too familiar.  According to the Nihon Shoki, Izanagi got upset and told Izanami that they would have to do it all over again because, of course, the man should speak first.  Yup, that’s right.  We haven’t even created the rest of the lands and Izanagi is already getting upset and making Izanami do it all over again so that it doesn’t break his fragile male ego. So… yeah…  You know they don’t say anything about it, but I can just feel Izanami’s eyeroll down through the centuries.

The Kojiki isn’t much better in this regard, by the way.  In the Kojiki they go through with everything, but the first things they create are broken.  The first is the leech child, Hiruko, which they placed in a reed boat and tried to send away (yeah, awesome parenting guys). 

Of course, there’s no indication that this kind of patriarchal thinking was there in the beginning of Japanese culture—heck we just did an episode on Queen Himiko, and I doubt she was waiting for the man to talk first.  In addition, there were a lot of very powerful women who were overseeing the court at this time.  I highly suspect this comes from the Confucian worldview that had been brought over with Chinese learning in the 5th and 6th centuries, but they weren’t losing any time getting to the point.  Men first, women second.  The proper ordering of the world was important to peace and stability.

Regardless of this little mysoginistic intervention, Izanagi and Izanami do end up procreating and from their union they basically create the entire Japanese island chain—or at least the parts that were important to Yamato.

So the first island is Awaji, sitting in the Inland sea just south of modern Kobe.  Then there is Iyo, aka Shikoku, followed by Oki, aka Okinoshima, a holy island in the Korean straits that has been used for religious ceremonies for at least the last couple millennia, if not longer.  Then there is Tsukushi, which is another name for Kyushu, and Iki, which we know from our examination of the Chinese records.  Next is Tsushima, which we’ve also dealt with, and then Sado, an island north of Honshu, due west of modern Niigata city.  Sado had been inhabited since Jomon times, but by the 8th century it had become a place to exile people to, particularly political rivals.  It later was known for its gold mines, which started producing in the late 12th century.

After Sado was the last island:  Oho Yamato Toyo Aki tsu Shima… aka Honshu.  The main island of Yamato.  Based on the original name it is also sometimes referred to as the Abundant Reed Plain, which will be a common moniker in many of the later stories.

Of course, the Nihon Shoki gives it slightly differently, adding a few other islands (notably Koshi, Ohoshima, and Kibi no ko), and relegating Tsushima and Iki to being produced simply by the “coagulation of the waves”.  No mention is made of the Korean peninsula or the mainland in either account.  Likewise Hokkaido and the various islands of the Ryukyu chain—all those are left out, giving us a pretty good idea of just what Yamato considered as its territory.  Beyond those 8 islands there are a plethora of other, smaller islands that get a mention, but we won’t go through them all, here.

After that, they gave birth to numerous other gods and goddesses, and things seemed to be going well, until one birth didn’t go as planned, and Izanami died.  There are different reasons given for it, but in the Kojiki it was the birth of a fire kami, Kagatsuchi, that ended up severely burning Izanami, who died as a result.  At this, Izanagi was distraught.  He was out of his mind.  He killed the fire spirit—once again demonstrating those A+ parenting skills—and decided to follow Izanagi down into the land of the dead, the land of Yomi.  Once there, he came the palace where she was staying, and he was overjoyed to have found her again.  He insisted she come back so they could continue to procreate—totally just to finish their work, you know—but Izanami was hesitant.  She had already eaten at the hearth of Yomi, and she would need the permission of the gods of the dead to return.  She made a simple request to Izanagi:  that while she getting their permission, he was not to look at her.  Izanagi agreed and Izanami went inside.

Did I mention how much Izanagi seems like a teenager to me?  Well, just like any teen, his patience for waiting was apparently zilch.  So what does he do?  He decides he just has to see her, despite his promise, and so he creates a light and goes inside to see his lovely bride.

Except, remember, his bride had been dead for some time, and the light he brought in showed her ugly, bloated corpse, riddled with maggots.  She was covered in them, some of which had become fierce spirits—thunder spirits, they are called in the text, though at one time it may have referred to snakes, oddly enough.  Repulsed by her putrefied form, Izanagi fled.

Well Izanami was pissed.  Not only had Izanagi broken his promise to her, he’d gone running out of there like a frightened little boy.  And so for the first time we see how a gentle kami can turn into a raging spirit.  She immediately sent the hags of Yomi after him.  With the hags chasing him, Izanagi untied a ribbon from his hair and threw it behind him, and it became grapevines.  The hags briefly stopped their chase to gorge themselves, but pretty soon they were done, and they were after him again!  And so Izanagi threw down a comb, which started sprouting up into a grove of bamboo.  The hags once again stopped to eat the tender shoots that were growing up, out of the ground, and he escaped.

Later, Izanami, still upset, sent the thunder kami and a horde of spirits after Izanagi.  Izanagi took out his sword and waved it behind him while he fled, keeping the hordes at bay, until he came to a peach tree.  He pulled down three peaches, and when his pursuers were in range, he tossed the peaches at them, which caused them to run off.

Okay, so, um… he has a sword, which he just kind of waves behind him? But it apparently isn’t nearly as good as the ultimate weapon:  peaches.  You know, those soft, sweet, fuzzy fruits.  At first blush it doesn’t seem to make sense—one of those things that only shows up in these kinds of fantastic stories.

However, this does make more sense in context of some of the Chinese influences.  For instance, peaches were the fruit of immortality found in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West in Chinese lore, and were often depicted as being used to dispel evil spirits.  That suggests to me that this is probably a Chinese addition to the tale—a local Japanese explanation for a practice that probably came from the mainland, originally.  Whatever the reason, peaches were apparently what saved the day, at least for a time.

With her armies sent back, Izanami finally decided to go after Izanagi herself.  She caught up with him at the entrance to the land of Yomi, where Izanagi had rolled a large boulder to close off the way.  There they were, on either side of the boulder, which is where Izanagi decides to finally break it off with Izanami, who was still none too pleased.  She threatened to mow down 1,000 humans every day if Izanagi didn’t take her back, and Izanagi then promised to build 1500 child-bearing huts every day in return.  That’s why so many people die, but there are always even more that are born.

So that’s the story of Izanagi and Izanami.  It starts out great, but it gets dark fast.  And if it feels familiar, it should.  Many of the elements found in this story are common across the world.  Even in Greek and Roman stories you’ll find similar elements.  Europe had plenty of stories where someone would throw magical items behind themselves as they ran away from a threat of some kind or another, and many of these threats start when someone breaks a simple promise.

There are also some important concepts here.  For one, kami can die and go down to the land of Yomi.  This is literally a land underground and therefore a land of darkness.  After all, think about the burial practices up to the 6th century—people buried in large, mounded tombs, with the central chamber covered in large stones, which includes a large stone to block the entrance passage.  In some telling of this story, in fact, Izanagi doesn’t go down to some otherworld, but in fact simply enters Izanami’s tomb mound, where he then sees her decaying body.

Imagery in this scene may have also been connected to a popular ritual called mogari, where a corpse would be left in a hut near the relatives home until it began to putrefy, at which point it would be taken to be buried.  Up to that point in the process, prayers would be offered, hoping to call back the spirit to the body.  The imagery in this story in the Kiki may have been drawn from these practices.

As this concept evolved into the land of Yomi, the World of Darkness, it had similarities to the Greek underworld of Hades.  For instance, once you partake of the food in the land of the dead, you cannot leave.  This hearkens back to the story of Persephone, who ate the pomegranate and therefore had to spend some time each year in the underworld.  These are common features of many cultures, and not unique to Japan. 

There are other relatable elements as well.  Take, for instance, Izanami’s death in childbirth.  We often forget just how dangerous giving birth is, especially in premodern times before modern medicine, and death in childbirth has always been a real threat for women around the world, not just in Japan.  That Izanami, in many ways the ultimate mother figure, would die in this way is entirely in keeping with the harsh realities of the world.

Now as much as we focus on the pair of deities, and despite the shade I may throw his way, it is also clear from this story that Izanagi is supposed to be our protagonist.  And even though that’s the case, he’s not perfect. Heck, I wouldn’t even say he’s nice.  Frankly, he’s a pretty superficial guy, if you ask me—not sure what that says about the people of Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries, but there you go.  I do think that it says a lot about the concept of kami—they are powerful, but not perfect

Finally, at the end of this episode, we see a change and reversal of roles.  Where initially it took two, male and female, to create, now Izanagi takes on a role as a creator, himself.  In some of versions of the story he would even go on to give life to other kami, by himself.  Meanwhile, Izanami, the original mother figure, takes on the aspect of violence and death.

After his descent down into Yomi, several of the stories mention that Izanagi then goes to purify himself.  This is an important precedent, as anything involving death is considered an impurity.  Even just a little bit of blood could require purification, but having gone into the land of death requires that Izanagi do something major—and he does, at least according to some of the accounts. 

Now remember that place where he had entered into Yomi, and where he later rolled a boulder across to block the path?  The Kojiki places it on the main route between the states of Yamato and Izumo, possibly representing some ancient conflict between the two—something we’ll get into later with the next part of the cycle.  However, he then travels then all the way from Izumo down to Tsukushi—Kyushu—to purify himself. As he does so, he starts creating kami left and right—from the articles of clothing he removes to the impurities that are washed away in the different depths of water that he submerges himself in—the names are all in the records if you want to read them.

More important than the individual kami, to me at least, is the sudden shift in location, which suggests to me that these were various localized stories that were stitched together for the story.  The purification ritual is important—this is one of those things that is key to many Shinto rituals.  But the fact that it is taking place in southeast Kyushu and while the other account was up between Yamato and Izumo—I mean, I know he’s a god and all, but that is a heck of long way to go to take a bath.

Rather, I suspect we are getting one story that incorporates different elements of local stories from other places.  The creation, death, burial, and trip into and out of Yomi appears to be something happening in Izumo or Yamato, but the ritual cleansing is happening in Kyushu.  These are just the sort of elements that can be easily glossed over, but that help us pick apart some of what might actually be happening, under the surface.  I think it is also possible that the whole thing was originally taking place in Tsukushi—Kyushu, and that it was later moved closer to Yamato, since that’s where everything else happens.

But I digress.  We’ll have more of that in a bit, but let us close out our story on Izanagi and Izanami, for now.

Next time, we’ll talk about their children, especially two:  Amaterasu no Ohomikami and Susanowo no Mikoto.  Until then, thank you for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, we have information about our KoFi site over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we’ll also have some photos of various artifacts that we’ve discussed, as well as references and other material used for this episode.  Questions or comments?  Feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.

That’s all for now.  Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.