Ama Was the Sea Before It Was Heaven

Two concepts are essential to understanding this myth: the amatsukami (天つ神) and the kunitsukami (国つ神). Amatsukami is read "Ama-tsu-kami," and today we take "ama," written with the character 天, to mean the heavens above. The ancients did not think so. Before Chinese characters came into use, the sound "ama" in ancient Japan was a common word for the sea, and it belonged to the sea peoples. By the time the myths were set down in writing, the court elite had already taken up the characters, and what these old sounds carried had been forgotten. The sounds of antiquity cannot be reduced to a single meaning. Even "ama," which meant the sea to the sea peoples, probably shifted in meaning with the occasion.

What fascinates me is that Japan has kept alive, in its place names, the meaning of old words that were already forgotten when the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were compiled. Among the places I have visited myself, many names link "ama" to the sea. Amami Oshima, an island off Kyushu, is the classic case, and others survive in various forms, such as 海部, 阿麻 and 海士, all read "ama." It is worth noting that every one of them names a strategic point on the coast.

Even today, along coastlines throughout Japan, people who make their living diving and fishing in the sea are still called ama (海人・海女). In the southern islands off Kyushu, the name Amami (奄美大島, Amami Oshima) preserves the same maritime root. Moreover, the powerful ancient seafaring clan that plied the waters around the archipelago was known as the Amabe (海部氏, read ama), holding sway along coastal regions across Japan. To this day, the chief priest of Kono Shrine on the coast of Tango in Kyoto Prefecture is a direct descendant of the Amabe family, whose detailed genealogy is preserved as a National Treasure.

This suggests that the amatsukami originated in the sea, and that the name preserves an old memory of gods who crossed it. The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi once made a remark that bears on this. Japanese gods, he said, changed from "visiting gods from the sea" to "visiting gods from the mountains" to "visiting gods from the heavens," and Japan's own faith grew within this three-layered structure. The amatsukami presumably followed the same course. By 712, when the Kojiki was completed, the faith already pointed to a realm in the sky. Put another way, the rulers of the Yamato court who took part in compiling the Kojiki lifted the amatsukami from the sea to the heavens.

That is why, in the kuniyuzuri, the amatsukami side is told through the image of a heavenly realm. Their sovereign, Amaterasu, presses the Izumo sphere to cede its land. The gods were moved from the flat expanse of the sea into the sky because the court wanted to bind Amaterasu to the sun. The name is now written 天照大神, "the great god who illuminates the heavens." In the old faith, however, Amaterasu was "the god who illuminates the sea," and her origin lay in the worship of the sea peoples. The drive to make Amaterasu the ancestral deity of the imperial house gathered force under Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686), the fortieth sovereign and the very man who ordered the Kojiki compiled. From about then, Amaterasu, once a guardian of the sea, became the sun goddess of the heavens.

Today Amaterasu is written 天照, which means "illuminating heaven," and this has come to symbolize the worship of "illuminating heaven = the sun." In the old view, though, Amaterasu is rightly written 海照, "illuminating the sea." The sound is the same, but the meaning changed greatly through the characters, a symbolic case. Amaterasu was originally a god worshipped as the "deity who lights the sea" by tribes on the coast of Ise, and had no direct relation to sun worship.