308 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
This part of the myth is filled with identifiable elements of folk Shinto. There
is the horror of death and the decaying body when Izanagi tries to rescue his sis-
ter, requiring purification in the nearest stream. There are the ritual offenses that
outrage the greatest kami, the Sun Goddess, which threaten survival of the world
when she hides in a cave. The first matsuri is held to lure her out, filled with the
same kind of riotous entertainment featured at modern kami festivals.
The Sun Goddess then dispatched her grandson, Ninigi, to the “land of
luxuriant rice fields,” commanding him to govern it. “Go! And may pros-
perity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like Heaven and Earth, endure for-
ever.” To seal her command, the Sun Goddess bestowed upon Ninigi a
sacred regalia: a bronze mirror, a sword, and a curved jewel. Ninigi
descended from heaven to a mountaintop in southeastern Kyushu, but did
little to assert his rule. His grandson Jimmu conducted a campaign in the
central provinces, destroyed aboriginal enemies, performed rites to his
ancestress, the Sun Goddess, and became the first emperor of Japan.
Myths must be read in the context of the cultures in which they live, as that
is how they are written. The myth of Izanagi and Izanami accounts for the ori-
gin of many essential features of Shinto and of the Japanese state, and in the
process of explaining origins it gives a cosmic sanction to those beliefs and ide-
ologies. How could you overthrow a dynasty descended from the Sun Goddess
Amaterasu herself? There is a political genius at work in the myth—or
“mythistory”—that we might wonder about from the political cynicism of our
age. It is certain, of course, that the princes and scribes who produced the 30
books of the Nihon Shoki drew on a large body of preexisting mythology, but it
is unlikely that that mythology, coming down from earlier prestate societies,
would have had such a political endpoint in mind; people do not put kings in
their myths before kings have emerged in their society. And the compilers of the
Nihon Shoki were almost certainly guarding against any appearance in Japan of
China’s concept of the Mandate of Heaven, whose political repercussions were
so apparent in Sima Qian’s history of the fall of dynasty after dynasty that grew
corrupt and were replaced by new, righteous founder-emperors. And so they
have Amaterasu say: “May prosperity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like
Heaven and Earth, endure forever.” We see why there is no mention of any
Queen Himiko, so clearly documented in Chinese sources; she was not part of
the successful ruling line; thus she has disappeared from Japanese historical
memory. Clearly this was a construction intended to validate an existing power
structure and underwrite its authority forever, as Ebersole writes:
The legitimation of the Temmu-Jito line of the imperial family was one of
the primary intentions behind the commissioning of the Kojiki, the Nihon
Shoki, and the Man yoshu. In the process of the realization of the historio-
graphic project of the imperial family, the editors of these texts had avail-
able for their use not only written documents and various clan histories but
also oral histories, myths, legends, and a large corpus of poetry. We can
assume that if their history was to be believable, they could not use a crude