Ame-no-Minakanushi

Ame-no-Minakanushi, the name means the Lord of the August Centre of Heaven or Master of the Centre of Heaven, is, in the account of the Kojiki, the very first kami to come into being at the origin of the cosmos, appearing alone in the High Plain of Heaven when heaven and earth first divided. He heads the group known as the three creator kami (the zoka no sanshin), the first deities who arise at the beginning, and he is described as a solitary deity who came into existence and then concealed himself, without myth or offspring.

In the oldest texts he is thus an abstract, remote first principle, the still centre at the origin of things, rather than an actively worshipped god, and for much of Japanese history he received little popular devotion, overshadowed by the vivid and story-rich deities who came after him. His importance grew later and largely through interpretation: in the medieval and especially the early-modern periods, thinkers of various Shinto schools, and later the scholars of Kokugaku (National Learning) and a number of new religious movements, took up Ame-no-Minakanushi as a supreme, central creator-deity, sometimes identifying him with the cosmic first principle or drawing him toward a more monotheistic conception of a single origin of all things. He is a good example of a deity who is prominent at the very head of the mythological record yet nearly silent within it, and whose significance was drawn out chiefly by later theology reaching back to the first name in the Kojiki as the source of everything that followed.

For most of Japanese history Ame-no-Minakanushi existed only on the page, the first name in the Kojiki's cosmogony but the object of essentially no shrine cult, a philosophical starting point rather than a god anyone prayed to directly. That changed, in a limited but visible way, through the Suitengu shrines, a network with its head shrine in Kurume and a well known branch in Tokyo, which enshrine Amenominakanushi alongside other figures including the child emperor Antoku, and which are visited today chiefly by expectant parents seeking blessing for safe childbirth and the wellbeing of small children, a devotional purpose with no clear connection to his original role as the still, ordering center of the cosmos. This popular association arose through syncretism with Suiten, a water deity of Buddhist origin whose name is written with characters meaning water heaven and who was identified with the native kami during the long period when Buddhist and Shinto worship were closely intertwined; the modern Suitengu shrines descend directly from that combined cult, even after the Meiji era's formal separation of the two religions.

Ame-no-Minakanushi's late elevation by Kokugaku scholars and by new religious movements, several of which placed him at the center of newly systematized creation theologies, ran on a largely separate, more intellectual track from this popular shrine devotion, so that the same deity has, in effect, two distinct modern profiles: a scholarly one, reasoned toward by theologians, and a popular one, quietly petitioned by mothers and infants at Suitengu.