Who Is Tsukuyomi? The Moon Kami in the Chronicles and at Ise

Near the Inner Shrine at Ise, four small shrines stand in a row, and visitors customarily greet them in a set order. The first belongs to a moon kami. That is the puzzle of this page. A deity honored in these precincts since at least the year 804 has almost no story. The oldest books give him a birth, an assignment of duties, and one killing that some of them hand to someone else. After that comes silence. Below you will find what the two early chronicles actually say, what Ise's own records add, and how village moon-watching customs fill the gap. Where the sources disagree, this page says so.

Four shrines in a row at Ise

The group is called Tsukiyomi-no-miya. It lies in Nakamura-cho in Ise city, close to the Inner Shrine but outside its precinct. Four sanctuaries stand side by side: the moon kami, a companion shrine for his "aramitama" (the strong, active aspect of a kami's spirit, an idea Ise applies to Amaterasu as well), then Izanagi and Izanami, the pair Ise names as his parents. The shrine's own page says worshippers usually go through them in numbered order.

That page reads the name as "reading the moon" and describes a kami who teaches the waxing and waning of the moon and presides over the calendar. It also calls him the younger brother of the sun kami.

A second Tsukiyomi-no-miya stands near the Outer Shrine, at the end of a straight path from the north gate, among old camphor trees. Ise says the Engishiki, a Heian law code presented in 927, lists it as a "Tsukiyomi shrine" at the head of the Outer Shrine's subordinate shrines, and that it was raised to the rank of separate shrine in 1210.

The Inner Shrine group has its own paper trail. A document of 804 describes it as one enclosure with four main halls. The Engishiki shows two enclosures. Each of the four has had its own fence only since 1873.

What the Kojiki says, and where it stops

After fleeing the land of the dead, Izanagi purifies himself at a river mouth. Amaterasu is born as he washes his left eye, the moon kami as he washes his right eye, and Susanoo as he washes his nose. Izanagi then hands out their realms.

"Do Thine Augustness rule the Dominion of the Night." Chamberlain, Kojiki (1882), Sect. XI, pp. 43-44.

Amaterasu receives the High Plain of Heaven and Susanoo the sea. Chamberlain translates the moon kami's name as "Moon-Night-Possessor" and adds a note that its exact meaning is disputed. Then the Kojiki loses interest. As the Encyclopedia of Shinto observes, he does not appear again after the account of his birth.

Several births in the Nihon Shoki

The Nihon Shoki says more but agrees with itself less. Its main text and its "one writing" variants differ on how the moon kami was born and what he was given.

Aston gives all these variants in his 1896 translation. The Encyclopedia of Shinto sums up the same spread: sea in one text, night in another, a heavenly partner to the sun in a third.

The food-goddess episode: one story, two killers

One variant of the Nihon Shoki gives the moon kami his only real scene. Amaterasu sends him to the food kami Ukemochi in the central land of reed plains. Facing the land, Ukemochi produces boiled rice from her mouth. Facing the sea, she produces fish. Facing the mountains, she produces furred animals. All of it is set out on a hundred tables.

He is enraged at being fed what came from her mouth, draws his sword and kills her. Amaterasu hears his report.

"Thou art a wicked Deity. I must not see thee face to face." Aston, Nihongi (1896), vol. 1, Book I, p. 32.

The text says the two were then parted by one day and one night, and lived apart. A second messenger finds that cattle, horses, silkworms, millet, rice, wheat and beans have grown from the dead food kami's body. Amaterasu takes the seed for sowing and makes rice the crop of the watered fields.

The Kojiki has the same plot with a different killer. After his expulsion, Susanoo asks the Princess-of-Great-Food for food, concludes that she is offering him filth, and kills her. Crops grow from her body there too (Chamberlain, Sect. XVII, pp. 59-60). A scholar writing in the Encyclopedia of Shinto calls the Ukemochi tale a food-origin myth, and notes that some theories identify Ukemochi with the Kojiki's princess. Ise's pages on its moon shrines never mention the episode.

How to read the sources: who wrote what, and when

Both chronicles are court books. The Kojiki was finished by O no Yasumaro during Empress Genmei's reign (707-715), after work that began under Emperor Tenmu, and was written for domestic readers. The Nihon Shoki was made at about the same time, in the Chinese style, as an official history meant to be readable in China too. Neither is a liturgy.

The shrine sources are different in kind. Ise's page cites an 804 record and the Engishiki of 927, administrative documents about places and rites, not stories.

A third kind turns up inside the Nihon Shoki itself. In the third year of Emperor Kenso, the moon kami speaks through a human medium and asks that people and land be dedicated to Takamimusubi, whom he calls his ancestor. Fields are then set aside and a man named Oshimi no Sukune is appointed to tend a shrine (Aston, vol. 1, pp. 391-392). Aston's translation dates the entry only by reign year.

A short checklist for any retelling you meet:

• Which book is it, and is it the main text or a variant?
• Who does the killing: the moon kami or Susanoo?
• Is a shrine saying this, or a storyteller?

Waiting for the moon

The Encyclopedia of Shinto describes gatherings called tsukimachi. On set evenings of the lunar month, commonly the 17th, 19th, 22nd or 23rd, members of a confraternity eat, drink and wait for the moon to rise. A scroll of the moon kami is hung in the alcove and votive candles are lit. The 23rd-night group is the most widespread, and a tower for it is often found in a corner of a hamlet or village.

The same entry makes a point worth keeping. Naming the moon kami as the object of worship in these gatherings, it says, comes from the interpretations of Edo-period Shinto scholars. Earlier, the moon itself was revered as the body in which a kami's spirit dwells. The folk custom and the chronicle figure may have joined late.

Common mix-ups

• "He is the food goddess's killer in every book." Only in a variant recorded in the Nihon Shoki. The Kojiki gives the deed to Susanoo.
• "The quarrel exiled him to the moon." The text says only that the two kami lived apart. Aston, in 1896, took that variant to be the older form of the myth because it explains why sun and moon are never seen together.
• "His name has one settled meaning." Chamberlain gives "Moon-Night-Possessor" and flags doubt. Ise and the Encyclopedia stress "reading" the moon. Aston notes a Nihon Shoki spelling, Tsukiyumi, whose second part can mean a bow.
• "There is a single Tsukiyomi shrine." Ise alone has two, and the Encyclopedia of Shinto mentions several more in the Yamashiro and Ise areas.