The Sun Goddess Amaterasu and the Cave of Heaven

Susanoo’s Rampage

When Izanagi ordered his son Susanoo into exile, Susanoo said he would say farewell to his sister Amaterasu before he went. As he ascended to heaven to do so, the mountains and rivers roared and the ground trembled.

“Nothing good can come of this,” Amaterasu said. “He may be planning to seize my lands.” She untied her hair and retied it like a man’s in two loops, one on each side of her face, and then wrapped long strings of magatama beads around her hair and arms. Two great quivers, a bamboo wrist-guard, and a mighty bow completed her warlike stance. Stamping her feet, she sent earth flying like fine snow, and demanded of her brother, “Why have you come here?”

“I have no ill intentions,” Susanoo said, explaining that he only wished to say goodbye before his exile.

“How can I know that your heart is pure?” Amaterasu asked.

“Let’s swear oaths and bring forth children.”

The two of them stood on either bank of heaven’s Yasunokawa, the Tranquil River, and each swore their oaths. Amaterasu asked Susanoo to hand over his long sword, and she broke it into three parts, which she rinsed in heaven’s well. Then she chewed the parts and spat them out, where they became three female spirits.

Next, Susanoo received Amaterasu’s beads from her hair and arms, rinsing, chewing and spitting them out to create five male spirits.

Amaterasu said, “These five spirits came from my possessions and so they are my children. The three female spirits came from your possessions, so they are yours.”

“This proves that my heart is pure,” Susanoo said. “All my children are gentle girls. I’m the winner.” In his triumph, he smashed the ridges and filled up the ditches in the rice fields, and scattered his excrement around the shrine where the harvest meal took place. Even at this, Amaterasu made excuses for him, saying that he must have only vomited and that his destruction in the fields was because he thought they were going to waste.

But Susanoo only became more outrageous. When Amaterasu was in the sacred weaving hall, he made a hole in the roof and flung a skinned piebald colt inside. One of the weaving maidens was so shocked that she thrust her shuttle into her genitals and perished.

The Cave of Heaven

Amaterasu was frightened and fled to Amanoiwato, Heaven’s Rock Cave, shutting herself inside. Heaven was plunged into darkness, and soon it was filled with the cries of deities like the buzzing of flies. Calamity followed calamity.

Multitudes of deities gathered on the banks of Yasunokawa to see what they could do. They called on the god of wisdom to think. They brought together long-crowing cockerels and had them cry out. They made a huge mirror and strings of magatama beads. They called on the deities Koyane and Futodama to perform divination with the shoulder bone of a stag and heavenly wood. They pulled a sacred sakaki tree up by its roots and hung the beads on its upper branches, the mirror on its middle branches, and strips of white paper and blue hemp on its lower branches.

Futodama offered up these objects, and Koyane recited prayers. The strong god Tajikarao waited in hiding by the cave entrance. The goddess Uzume tied vines around her sleeves and head, and held a rustling branch of bamboo in her hands. She kicked over a bucket in front of the cave, and stomped upon it, entering a frenzy in which she bared her breasts, and tugged her skirt down beneath her genitals. All the assembled gods burst into laughter.

Thinking something was strange, Amaterasu opened the door to the cave a crack. “Because I’m in here, heaven is in darkness, so why is Uzume singing and dancing, and why are all the gods laughing?”

“We’ve found a better deity than you,” Uzume said, “And that’s why we laugh and dance.” Koyane and Futodama showed Amaterasu the mirror. More confused than ever by the image, Amaterasu peeped outside and crept a little way out of the cave, at which the strong god Tajikarao stepped from his hiding place, took her by the hand, and pulled her into the open.

Futodama stretched a sacred rope across the cave entrance behind her, saying “You may not pass back through here.”

With Amaterasu’s emergence from the cave, heaven was bright again from her light.

(© Stuart Ayre)

(Text by Richard Medhurst, based on the story in Kojiki. Illustrations © Stuart Ayre.)