Amaterasu Before the Sun

Put simply, Amaterasu was neither a goddess of the high heavens nor an indigenous deity native to the Japanese islands. She was the tutelary deity of migrant groups who came from across the sea—from the direction of the Chinese continent—and at the root of her worship lay a guiding presence prayed to for safe passage across uncharted waters. That was the true origin of Amaterasu. Later, once the age of maritime crossings gave way to settlement and assimilation across the archipelago, fierce struggles broke out among rival groups over ancestral legitimacy. Through repeated cycles of fracture and alliance, these migrant coalitions grew in scale until they pushed into the fertile southern Yamato basin—present-day southern Nara Prefecture, a landscape ideally suited to wet-rice cultivation—and established a unified polity. That was the beginning of state formation in Japan.

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.

What stirs my interest is how this new religion was suddenly born in Yamato, and what faith and ritual it held. The Gishiwajinden does not give these, but by investigating from many angles we can come a little closer to the reality. In fact, the formation of Himiko's kido is not unrelated to the birth of the goddess Amaterasu of Japanese myth. Amaterasu was later folded into a sun god, but her original nature was a goddess who lights the sea, and her source lies in the gods of the seafaring tribes. In the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and the present Ise Jingu, where Amaterasu is worshiped, she is placed as a goddess, but other documents and traditions show that in an older age she was a male god.

My own view is that when sun worship flowed into Japan and people tried to organize it as ritual, a primal change occurred in which Amaterasu shifted from a male god to a goddess. If it had been simple sun worship, the male kings of Yamato would have had no need to put Himiko forward as queen, and one of the kings could have taken the place of chief priest of the new religion. But the male kings of the Yamato tribes in this age did not take that way. They went out of their way to raise a girl jointly and set her on the throne as queen. This carries an ancient memory that, from the point of view of their faith, kings had not succeeded in bringing down the will of the sun god, and it suggests that by putting Himiko on the throne they succeeded in unifying the religion. That is, the main power of sun worship in the Yamato region of the archipelago very likely held a religious teaching that set a female shaman at the summit of ritual.

This is precisely where the Nihon Shoki becomes indispensable. Rather than having Omononushi appear directly in Sujin's own dream, the Nihon Shoki has the god reveal himself in the dreams of three of the emperor's ministers. More importantly, it records a monumental event that preceded those dream oracles. Unable to sleep, Sujin prayed ceaselessly for deliverance. Through this vigil, it became apparent that one source of the catastrophe lay in the palace itself: Amaterasu and Yamato no Okunitama (the Great Spirit of the Land of Yamato) were being enshrined side by side within the sovereign's residence. Yamato no Okunitama does not appear in the Kojiki, yet subsequent traditions reveal an intimate connection between this god and Omononushi. Patterned after the formal prose of Chinese dynastic histories, the chronicle records: "In the sixth year, the people wandered abroad, and some revolted. The situation was beyond the power of virtue to control. Therefore, rising early and resting late, the sovereign prayed to the gods of heaven and earth. Prior to this, the two deities Amaterasu no Omikami and Yamato no Okunitama had been worshipped together within the great hall of the sovereign. But fearing the dread majesty of their divine powers, he felt uneasy dwelling with them."

The spiritual reality underlying this passage is stark: within the domestic space of the court, two irreconcilable divine lineages—the amatsukami (天つ神), the gods of heaven, and the kunitsukami (国つ神), the gods of the land—were forced into direct proximity beneath the person of Emperor Sujin. This theological friction unleashed disaster upon the realm. Recognizing the peril, Sujin moved immediately to separate them.

He issued an imperial edict to two of his daughters, inaugurating a sacred quest to find fitting sanctuaries outside the palace. Amaterasu was entrusted to Princess Toyosukiirihime, while Yamato no Okunitama was committed to Princess Nunakinoirihime. Yet Nunakinoirihime soon found her spiritual strength exhausted, and was unable to enshrine the indigenous terrestrial deity. Toyosukiirihime, by contrast, succeeded in enshrining Amaterasu at the village of Kasanui in Yamato, establishing what is regarded as the archetype of the shrine precinct. This primary site of Amaterasu's wanderings survives today as Hibara Shrine, nestled along the mountain slopes roughly twenty minutes' walk from Omiwa Shrine in southern Nara.

The symbolic event is the one in which Amaterasu, the amatsukami set up as the imperial ancestor, was driven out of Yamato. The key figure is the tenth sovereign, Emperor Sujin, the first of the successive emperors whose real existence is established. Until Sujin's time, two gods, Amaterasu and Yamato no Okunitama, were enshrined side by side in the great hall of the palace. I will write about Yamato no Okunitama separately, but he is the soul of the land of Yamato itself, the strongest god of place. The rulers needed a technique of letting this soul of the land, born of place, possess them, of adjusting it, and of controlling it so as to bring prosperity. Here too an oracle of the gods appears.

In Sujin's time Yamato was collapsing from epidemic and famine, and half the people he ruled died. Many left Yamato in search of a new land, and rebellions followed one after another. Sujin thought that the cause of the collapse of his rule was divine power, and that it lay in enshrining two different gods, Amaterasu and Yamato no Okunitama, in the palace. The result was that the two were moved outside it. What matters is that Yamato no Okunitama stayed within Yamato, while Amaterasu, who should have been the emperor's imperial ancestor, was banished from Yamato and finally settled where Ise Jingu stands today.

According to the Nihon Shoki, it was Omononushi who spoke through the mouth of Yamatototohimomosohime, declaring to Sujin that if he desired the pacification of the realm, he must revere and properly worship Omononushi. The crucial point is that this divine decree was mediated through the ecstasy of an ancient female shaman, a miko (巫女). Here the fault line between the shamanic queen-culture of the Yayoi and the patriarchal king-culture of the Kofun period becomes visible. Yamatototohimomosohime stood as a ruler in the mold of a Yayoi tribal queen, while Sujin belonged to the emerging world of Kofun male kingship. The two figures drew upon fundamentally distinct ritual systems and cultural lineages, rooted in entirely separate worlds.

Put simply, it is highly probable that the shaman Yamatototohimomosohime was herself an autonomous queen commanding a specific tribal federation. For generations, scholars in Japan have argued that Yamatototohimomosohime was none other than Himiko, the shaman-queen of Yamatai recorded in the Gishi Wajinden section of China's Records of the Three Kingdoms—a conclusion that my own field research leads me to share. After male warrior-kings established hegemony across Yamato, the ancient shamanic queens of the Yayoi were retroactively absorbed into the patriarchal imperial genealogy. Grasping this structural synthesis is the master key to decoding the mythology of ancient Japan.

In fact, the very first place the Meiji government intervened was Ise Jingu. Its aim was to destroy the traditional character of shrines and institutionalize them in a form that would serve the building of a modern nation-state.

From a closed dimension of faith—enshrining the deity native to a particular locality and watching over the people who lived on that land—shrines were thus quietly converted into instruments of devotion to a single unified state. Chosen to stand at the apex of this structure was Ise Jingu: a thoroughly political shrine, selected by bureaucrats.

That Ise Jingu came to be regarded as the highest-ranking shrine in Japan is therefore a story that belongs entirely to the modern era. Nothing of the sort was true before then.

The overriding aim of Ise Shinto was to construct a theological system that placed Shinto above Buddhism. Drawing on ancient texts preserved at the Inner and Outer Shrines, the Watarai priests made the bold move of aligning Amaterasu, enshrined at the Inner Shrine (Kotaijingu), and Toyouke, enshrined at the Outer Shrine, with fundamental cosmic principles in order to rival Buddhist metaphysics. At the same time, the Watarai were fighting an internal struggle for prestige within Ise Jingu itself. As priests of the Outer Shrine, which then stood in the shadow of the Inner Shrine, they chafed at their secondary status. They therefore cast Toyouke as a primordial deity preceding Amaterasu, identifying Toyouke with Amenominakanushi—the deity of the very first stirrings of heaven and earth in Japanese myth—in an effort to restore the supremacy of the Outer Shrine.

Well versed in continental yin-yang and Five Phases cosmology, the Watarai also mapped the two shrines onto the elements, aligning the Inner Shrine with Fire and the Outer Shrine with Water. Invoking the classical principle that "Water overcomes Fire" (水克火), they argued for the absolute preeminence of Toyouke and the Outer Shrine. Ironically, this very alignment of the Inner Shrine with Fire fused with the solar imagery of Dainichi Nyorai, further cementing the identification of Amaterasu with the sun. Thus, out of a dual desire to overturn Buddhist dominance and to elevate the Outer Shrine within Ise, the Watarai forged an entirely new, systematized Shinto theology.