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Updated: September 23, 2025
The Records and the Chronicles alike represent Izanagi and Izanami as resorting to this method of presaging the future, and the practice derives interest from the fact that a precisely similar custom has prevailed in Mongolia from time immemorial.
All about Oba you may see many sekirei or wagtails-birds sacred to Izanami and Izanagi for a legend says that from the sekirei the gods first learned the art of love. And none, not even the most avaricious farmer, ever hurts or terrifies these birds. So that they do not fear the people of Oba, nor the scarecrows in the fields. The God of Scarecrows is Sukuna-biko-na-no-Kami.
This is a round bronze mirror, of which much is heard in early Japanese annals from the time of Izanagi downwards. This must have injuriously affected her progress in the art of bronze casting. Nevertheless, in almost all the dolmens and later tombs mirrors of bronze were placed.
Wandering disconsolate,* by the seashore, Hohodemi met the Kami of salt, who, advising him to consult the daughter of the ocean Kami, sent him to sea in a "stout little boat." *"Weeping and lamenting" are the words in the Records. One of the Kami begotten by Izanagi and Izanami.
Izanagi and Izanami thrust the spear downwards and stir the "brine" beneath, with the result that it coagulates, and, dropping from the spear's point, forms the first of the Japanese islands, Onogoro.
But even in that case what are we to think of his ascription of divinity to the race, in view of the moral and physical feebleness of human nature? The moral side of the question is answered by the Shinto theory of evil deities, "gods of crookedness," who were alleged to have "originated from the impurities contracted by Izanagi during his visit to the under-world."
The reed boat in which the leech, first offspring of Izanagi and Izanami, was sent adrift, "recalls the Accadian legend of Sargon and his ark of rushes, the biblical story of Moses as an infant and many more," though it has no known counterpart in Chinese mythology.
And there are many famed Shinto temples to be visited on the road, such as Take-uchi-jinja, dedicated to the venerable minister of the Empress Jingo, Take-uchi, to whom men now pray for health and for length of years; and Okusa-no-miya, or Rokusho-jinja, of the five greatest shrines in Izumo; and Manaijinja, sacred to Izanagi, the Mother of Gods, where strange pictures may be obtained of the Parents of the World; and Obano-miya, where Izanami is enshrined, also called Kamoshijinja, which means, 'The Soul of the God.
Whichever theory be correct and the latter certainly commends itself as the more probable it will be observed that both agree in assigning to Takama-ga-hara a terrestrial location; both agree in assigning the sense of "unsettled and turbulent" to the "floating, drifting" condition predicated of the country when the Kami first interested themselves in it, and both agree in interpreting as an insignium of military authority the "jewelled spear" given to Izanagi and Izanami an interpretation borne out by the fact that, in subsequent eras of Japanese history, it was customary for a ruler to delegate authority in this manner.
Izanagi, whose return to the upper world takes place in southwestern Japan,* now cleanses himself from the pollution he has incurred by contact with the dead, and thus inaugurates the rite of purification practised to this day in Japan.
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