How Japan Was Made: The Creation Myth Behind Awaji Island

Before There Was Anywhere The Kojiki, compiled in the early eighth century and the oldest surviving text in Japanese, begins with formlessness. There is no land and no sea, only a drifting, unsettled mass. A first generation of deities comes into being and, at the end of it, a pair are given an instruction: go and make this drifting thing solid.

Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven and lower a jewelled spear into the murk below. When they lift it out, the brine dripping from the tip congeals into the first island, Onogoro. This is the founding image of the whole tradition — creation as something stirred and drawn out rather than spoken into existence — and it is worth noticing how physical it is. The gods do manual work.

The Wedding That Had to Be Done Twice They descend to the island, build a pillar and a hall, and marry by circling the pillar from opposite directions. When they meet, Izanami speaks first. The child of that union is born deformed, set adrift in a reed boat, and not counted among their offspring.

When they consult the heavenly deities about what went wrong, the answer is procedural: the woman spoke first, and the ritual order was wrong. They repeat the ceremony with Izanagi speaking, and this time it works — the islands come in sequence, beginning with Awaji and continuing through Shikoku, Kyūshū, the smaller islands and finally Honshū.

It is impossible to read that episode now without registering what it encodes about hierarchy and gender in the society that wrote it down. It is also, in its own frame, a story about ritual precision — that the form of a thing matters as much as the intention behind it, which is an idea that runs through a great deal of Japanese religious practice since.

The Fire, and the Descent Having made the land, the pair go on to produce the deities of the natural world: mountains, rivers, wind, trees, the sea. The last is the god of fire, and bearing him kills Izanami. Grief-stricken, Izanagi goes down to Yomi, the land of the dead, to bring her back.

She tells him to wait outside and not to look. He waits, then lights a comb-tooth as a torch and looks anyway, and finds her body corrupt and swarming. He runs; she pursues, furious at being seen; and at the pass between the living world and the dead he blocks the entrance with a boulder. Through it, she declares she will kill a thousand people a day, and he answers that he will cause fifteen hundred to be born.

That exchange is the mythological origin of mortality itself, and it is also a plainly recognisable story about grief — the impulse to follow someone, the impossibility of it, and the fact that the world afterwards has to be divided into two places rather than one.

What Came Out of the Washing Izanagi, polluted by the underworld, purifies himself in a river. That act of misogi — ritual cleansing with water — is the direct ancestor of the basin you rinse your hands at when you enter a shrine today, and it is arguably the single most consequential moment in the text for anyone visiting Japan.

From the washing, three more deities are born: Amaterasu the sun goddess from his left eye, Tsukuyomi the moon from his right, and Susanoo the storm from his nose. Amaterasu's line runs to the imperial house, which is why this is not merely a folk tale but the founding document of a political claim.

Standing in the Story Awaji Island, in the Inland Sea between Kobe and Shikoku, is named in the text as the first island made, and Izanagi Jingū there is among the oldest shrines in the country — associated with the place where Izanagi is said to have retired. The whirlpools in the Naruto strait at the island's southern tip, where tidal currents force through a narrow channel, are a startlingly apt piece of scenery for a myth about a stirred sea.

The island is easy to reach and is not a pilgrimage in any demanding sense. It is simply the place the oldest book in the language says everything started, and it takes a couple of hours to get there from Osaka.