The Day the Sun Hid in a Cave

Why She Went In Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is born from Izanagi's left eye at the end of the creation story and given the high plain of heaven to rule. Her brother Susanoo, born from the nose, is given the sea and does not take it well.

What follows is a sustained campaign of provocation. He destroys the divisions between her rice paddies, fouls her halls, and finally flays a heavenly horse and throws it through the roof of the weaving hall where she and her attendants are working. One of the weavers is killed. Amaterasu withdraws into a cave, Ama-no-Iwato, and seals it with a boulder.

Without the sun, the world goes dark. Crops fail, malevolent spirits proliferate, and the text is explicit that calamity spreads everywhere at once. The gods gather in the dry riverbed outside to work out what to do.

The Trick The solution is neither force nor persuasion, which is what makes it memorable. They hang a mirror and jewels on a sakaki tree outside the cave, gather roosters to crow, and then Ame-no-Uzume, a goddess associated with dawn and merriment, overturns a tub, climbs on it, and performs a dance so uninhibited that the assembled deities roar with laughter.

Amaterasu, inside, cannot understand it. She asks how they can possibly be enjoying themselves while the world is dark. The answer she is given is that a deity greater than her has appeared — and when she edges the boulder aside to see, she is shown the mirror. Transfixed by her own reflection, which she does not recognise, she leans out. A god waiting beside the entrance takes her hand and pulls her clear, and another stretches a straw rope across the mouth of the cave so she cannot go back in.

The light returns. Susanoo is stripped of his beard and fingernails and expelled from heaven, which is the beginning of an entirely different story that ends in Shimane with an eight-headed serpent.

The Objects That Stayed Behind This episode is why several things at every Japanese shrine look the way they do. The rope stretched across the cave mouth is the ancestor of shimenawa, the thick braided rope marking sacred boundaries. The mirror is one of the three imperial regalia and is the central sacred object at Ise, the shrine dedicated to Amaterasu — not an image of the goddess, but a mirror, which is theologically a very different proposition.

Uzume's performance is remembered as the origin of kagura, sacred dance, and of a broader idea that noise, laughter and physical exuberance are religiously appropriate rather than irreverent. Japanese festivals make a great deal more sense once you know the founding story involves getting a god to come out of hiding by making everyone laugh.

The Political Weight Amaterasu is not simply a sun deity. Her grandson is sent down to rule the earthly realm, and his line is the imperial line, which means this story sits directly beneath the traditional claim to legitimacy of the Japanese throne. That claim was pressed hard in the modern period and formally set aside after 1945, and the shrines involved carry that history alongside the mythology.

It is worth knowing when you visit. These are places that were, within living memory, part of a state ideology, and they are now working shrines with a very old story attached.

Takachiho The valley in Miyazaki most associated with the episode holds Amano-Iwato Shrine, which venerates the cave, and Amano-Yasukawara, a large cavern in the riverbed said to be where the gods held their council — the floor of it is covered with small stone cairns left by visitors, which is one of the more affecting sights in Japan.

The nearby gorge, a narrow column-jointed volcanic canyon you can row a boat through, is what most people come for. The thing to stay for is the yokagura: night dance, performed in the villages here through the winter, in a tradition that traces itself directly back to the woman on the overturned tub.