Amaterasu

Amaterasu Omikami, the great kami who illuminates heaven, is the sun goddess of Shinto and the most exalted deity of the traditional Japanese pantheon. She is born, in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, from the left eye of the primordial god Izanagi as he purifies himself, and she is given rule over Takamagahara, the high plain of heaven.

Her central myth is the hiding in the cave. Offended and frightened by the violence of her brother, the storm-god Susanoo, Amaterasu withdraws into the Ama-no-Iwato, the heavenly rock-cave, and seals it, and the world goes dark. The assembled kami must lure her out: they hang a mirror and jewels on a tree, and the goddess Ame-no-Uzume performs a wild, comic dance that sets the gods roaring with laughter. Curious at the noise while she is meant to be absent, Amaterasu peers out, is caught by her own reflection in the mirror, and is drawn back into the world, restoring the light.

Unlike many sun deities, Amaterasu is female, and she is a goddess whose supremacy is expressed less through conquest than through light, weaving and the ordered fertility of the ruled world.

Amaterasu is bound to the Japanese imperial house. The traditional accounts hold that she sent her grandson Ninigi down to rule the islands, giving him three sacred treasures, the mirror, the sword and the jewel, that became the imperial regalia, and that the emperors descend from him and so from her. The mirror drawn from the cave is identified with the Yata-no-Kagami kept, by tradition, at her greatest shrine.

That shrine is Ise Jingu, the most sacred site of Shinto, where Amaterasu is enshrined in the Inner Shrine (Naiku). In a practice attested for many centuries, the shrine buildings are ritually rebuilt on an adjacent site every twenty years, the shikinen sengu, so that the sanctuary is at once immensely old and perpetually new, embodying a Shinto sense of renewal rather than preservation.

This mythology became politics. From the Meiji era into the Second World War, State Shinto made the emperor's divine descent from Amaterasu a doctrine of the state. After Japan's defeat, the Allied occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945 separated Shinto from the state, and on 1 January 1946 Emperor Hirohito publicly disavowed the idea that he was a living god descended from Amaterasu. Shinto continues today as a living religion; that specific political claim does not.