Every solar deity in this series so far has been relentless: Ra fighting through the night on schedule, Apollo blazing with terrible clarity. Japan's sun is different, and the difference is the whole teaching. Amaterasu Omikami, the great divinity illuminating heaven, chief among the Shinto kami and ancestress of the imperial line, is the only major sun in world mythology who, wounded by the world, went away.

The Cave

The story is the centre of the entire tradition. Her brother Susanoo, the storm, rampages through her domains: fields ruined, sacred halls defiled, a final outrage flung through the roof of her weaving hall. And Amaterasu, grieved past bearing, does not retaliate. She withdraws, enters the rock cave of heaven, and seals the door, and the world, all of it, goes dark. Crops fail in the endless night; calamities breed; eight million kami gather at the cave mouth with a problem no force can solve, because how do you compel the sun?

The answer the myth gives has been satisfying listeners for fifteen centuries. They do not compel her. They throw a party. The goddess Uzume overturns a tub, dances on it, outrageously, gloriously, and the assembled kami roar with laughter. Inside the cave, the sun hears it: laughter, in a world that should be weeping. Curiosity cracks the seal. She opens the door a sliver to ask how there can be joy without her, and is shown a mirror, her own light, the first thing she sees, and while she stares at her own forgotten radiance, the strong-armed kami gently widens the gap, and a rope is stretched across the cave mouth behind her so the dark can never again hold her completely.

  • The mirror: kept at Ise, the tradition holds, as the imperial regalia's heart; the instrument that returned the sun was showing her herself
  • The rope: the shimenawa still hung at every shrine, marking the boundary the darkness may not cross again
  • The dance and the laughter: joy as rescue equipment, the only tool that worked
  • The weaving hall: the sun as weaver, light as fabric, order as something made daily, not decreed
The myth's wisdom is in what the eight million did not do: light that has withdrawn cannot be forced out. It can only be reminded, by laughter and a mirror, of what it is.

The Story Behind the Stories

Historically, Amaterasu anchors Shinto's oldest chronicles, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki of the eighth century, where her grandson descends to rule the islands and the imperial house traces to her line, a genealogy that remained constitutionally live into the twentieth century. Her shrine at Ise, the tradition's holiest ground, is rebuilt from new timber every twenty years, and has been, with interruptions, for thirteen centuries: a sun goddess honoured not with eternal stone but with perpetual renewal, the building itself rising fresh each generation like its resident from the cave. The mirror, unseen by the public for a millennium, is simply trusted to be there, which may be the most Japanese sentence in this series.

What Amaterasu Teaches

That withdrawal is what wounded light does, in goddesses and in the people across your own table, and that the cave responds to neither force nor argument. That the rescue kit is precise: presence at the mouth of the dark, genuine laughter rather than performed cheer, and a mirror, some way of showing the withdrawn their own forgotten radiance, the office my colleague Mei's cards perform at small scale and good friends perform at every scale. And that afterward, wisely, one hangs the rope: renewal, like the shrine, is rebuilt on schedule, every twenty years, every morning, before the darkness reapplies.