Who Is Amaterasu? The Sun Kami in the Kojiki and at Ise

At Ise, pilgrims stop at a gate in the third of four wooden fences. They bow toward a courtyard they are not allowed to enter. Inside, according to the shrine, stands a mirror that serves as the symbol of the sun kami Amaterasu. Every twenty years that mirror is carried to a new building raised on the empty plot beside the old one.

Two books from the early eighth century tell her story, and they do not tell it the same way. This page follows her through those books, through one famous cave, and through the shrine where she is honored today.

Two books, two births

The oldest written accounts are the Kojiki, completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, finished in 720. Both were court projects. Kokugakuin University's Encyclopedia of Shinto ties the two projects to the era of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jito, when a legal code and a centralized state were taking shape. The books gather older tradition and put it in order. They are not eyewitness history.

On her birth, they split.

The Kojiki version is the one most people know. Izanagi, back from the land of the dead, calls it a hideous and polluted place and washes himself. The sun kami is born from his left eye, the moon kami Tsukuyomi from his right eye, the storm kami Susanoo from his nose. Afterward he takes the string of jewels from his own neck, gives it to her, and charges her to rule the Plain of High Heaven. The wife he left behind is Izanami; her story has its own page.

The Nihon Shoki does something different. It sets its alternatives side by side, each introduced by the phrase "one writing says," and never names a winner.

The cave, told twice

Both books give her a cave. They disagree about why she entered it.

In the Kojiki, her brother Susanoo has just claimed victory in a contest of oaths. He breaks down the divisions between her rice fields, fills in the irrigation ditches, and fouls the palace where she takes her meal. She makes excuses for him. Then he flays a piebald horse and lets it fall through the roof of the weaving hall where she is overseeing cloth for the kami. Terrified, she closes the door of the Heavenly Rock-Dwelling and bars it.

Darkness covers heaven and earth. Eight hundred myriad kami gather on the dry bed of the Tranquil River of Heaven. One of them, Thought-Includer, devises a plan: roosters to crow, a mirror forged by Ishikoridome, a long string of curved jewels, a sakaki tree dressed with both, cloth offerings, a prayer recited aloud. The Heavenly-Alarming-Female, usually called Ame no Uzume, dances on a sounding board until the heavens shake and the assembly laughs.

Inside, the sun kami wonders why anyone is laughing in the dark. The answer she is given is that there is a kami more illustrious than she. A mirror is held up. She leans out to look, a strong kami takes her hand, and a rope is stretched behind her with the words that she must go no further back in. Light returns.

The Nihon Shoki has several tellings. In one passage the cause is the fouled feast of first-fruits. In another, she is startled in the weaving hall, wounds herself with the shuttle, and enters the cave in anger. The Kojiki says terror. The Nihon Shoki here says injury and indignation. Even the mirror's metal is not settled: Chamberlain notes that the Kojiki's text says iron, while the main Nihon Shoki passage does not name the metal.

Who wrote this down, and for whom

Four kinds of voice speak about this kami, and they should not be mixed.

• Court chronicles (the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki). Eighth-century records of origin tales, written in Chinese characters for a court. We used the public-domain English translations by Chamberlain (1882) and Aston (1896). They are old, but their footnotes show how Japanese scholars read each line.
• Shrine accounts. Ise Jingu's own pages describe the shrine's history and rites as the shrine understands them.
• Modern scholarship. Kokugakuin University's reference works describe her as the ancestral kami of the imperial house and note that early myth credits her with showing people how to make food, clothing and dwellings.
• Later art. A print is a comment on a tale, not a record of one.

At Ise, where worship continues

Ise Jingu is a group of shrines, which the shrine counts as 125. At the center are two: the Inner Shrine, Naiku, dedicated to Amaterasu, and the Outer Shrine, Geku, dedicated to Toyouke, whom the shrine describes as her provider of sacred food. A bridge over the Isuzu River at the entrance of Naiku is said to mark the line between the daily world and a sacred one.

The shrine's own account says Emperor Sujin moved the mirror out of the imperial palace, and that a princess of Emperor Suinin's reign, Yamatohime, searched many regions until a revelation told her to enshrine it at Ise, about 2,000 years ago. That is the shrine's tradition. We found no independent source that fixes the date, so treat it as the shrine's account.

The calendar follows rice. The most important rite is Kanname-sai in October, when the first rice grown at Ise is offered with thanks for the gift of rice to the human world through her grandson. In the ancient court, according to the Encyclopedia of Shinto, the emperor shared a meal of old and new grain with her at the Tsukinami and Niiname rites.

Then there is the rebuilding, Shikinen Sengu. A new sanctuary of identical dimensions is built every twenty years on the adjacent site, and the mirror is moved by the priests. The shrine counts the first at Naiku in 690, under Empress Jito, and the latest, in 2013, as the sixty-second. About thirty rites are involved, spread across roughly eight years. Kokugakuin's encyclopedia says the practice was institutionalized under Tenmu and has continued for some 1,300 years, with interruptions.

Three questions before you repeat a claim

1. Which book, and which variant? "The Kojiki says" and "the Nihon Shoki says" are different sentences.
2. Is this a tale or a practice? The cave belongs to the chronicles. Kanname-sai and Shikinen Sengu belong to living worship.
3. Who is speaking? A court chronicle, a shrine, a university or an artist.

A worked example: in 1825 the artist Totoya Hokkei made The Cave Door of Spring, a set of five woodblock prints now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The museum describes the set as inspired by the cave tale. It shows that artists were still drawing the scene in the Edo period. It does not tell you what the Kojiki says, and it is not evidence for worship.

Common mistakes and mix-ups

• "The sacred mirror can be seen at Ise." It cannot. Visitors may not enter the courtyard of the main sanctuary, and the shrine calls the mirror a symbol of the kami.
• "The buildings are 2,000 years old." The shrine counts 2013 as its sixty-second Shikinen Sengu. The site and the rites continue, not the timber.
• "The books agree." They differ on her birth and on why she entered the cave.
• "She is the only kami at Ise." The Outer Shrine, Geku, belongs to Toyouke.
• "Amaterasu and Ohirume are two kami." The Nihon Shoki uses one name in its main text and the other in a variant, and Kokugakuin's entry gives them as names of one kami.