Onogoro- Japanese LocationLocation · Landmark"First Island"

The Stirring

Before Onogoro existed, the world below the heavens was formless. The Kojiki describes it as resembling oil floating on water, drifting like a jellyfish, with nothing solid anywhere to stand upon. The waters moved, the sky hovered, but between them nothing held firm.

The assembled kami of Takamagahara charged the last-created divine couple, Izanagi and Izanami, with solidifying the drifting world. The two descended to the Ame no Ukihashi, the Floating Bridge of Heaven, a structure that hangs above the formless sea. There they received the Heavenly Jeweled Spear, Ame-no-Nuboko, and thrust it downward into the primordial brine.

They stirred. The Kojiki renders the sound as koworokoworo, the thick curdling of liquid becoming something more than liquid. When they drew the spear up, brine dripped from its tip and accumulated below, coagulating into solid ground. This was Onogoro, the self-forming island, the first land in all existence.

The Pillar and the Hall

Izanagi and Izanami descended from the bridge to their new island and erected the Ame no Mihashira, the August Pillar of Heaven, at its center. It rose from the first land to connect the earth to the heavens above. Beside it they built the Yahiro-dono, the Hall of Eight Fathoms, the first building in creation.

The pillar was not decoration. Everything that followed depended on it.

The Marriage Rite

Around the pillar, Izanagi and Izanami performed the first marriage rite in the cosmos. They agreed to walk in opposite directions around the column and speak words of greeting when they met on the other side. Izanami walked from the right, Izanagi from the left. When they met, Izanami spoke first: "What a fine young man." Izanagi answered: "What a lovely young woman." They came together, and from their union Izanami conceived.

But the female had spoken before the male, a reversal of proper cosmic order, and the child born from this rite was Hiruko, the Leech Child, a creature without bones, unable to stand even at three years old. They placed him in a reed boat and set him adrift. When they consulted the heavenly kami through futomani divination, the answer was clear: the male must speak first.

They circled the pillar again. This time Izanagi spoke first. And from the unions that followed, properly ordered, the islands of Japan were born.

The Birth of Japan

From Onogoro, the divine couple's creative work radiated outward. Izanami gave birth to the great islands in sequence: Awaji first, the nearest to Onogoro, then six more, and finally Honshū, which the Kojiki calls Ōyamato-Toyoakitsushima, the Bountiful Land of Autumn Harvests. Together these eight formed the Ōyashima, the Great Eight Islands, and each was born as a kami in its own right.

After the islands, Izanami bore kami of the sea and the mountains, of rivers and wind. The world that had been formless when Izanagi first thrust the spear into the brine was filling with form and presence.

Then Izanami gave birth to Kagutsuchi, the fire god. The flames of his emergence burned through her body and killed her. Izanagi, wild with grief, drew the ten-span sword Totsuka-no-Tsurugi and cut down the newborn fire god. From Kagutsuchi's blood and body emerged still more kami: mountain gods and thunder gods, creation continuing even through death and rage. But vengeance was not enough. Izanagi descended into Yomi, the land of the dead, to retrieve his wife, carrying the story far from Onogoro but never from what had begun on its shores.