Yomi- Japanese LocationLocation · Realm"Land of the Dead"

Beneath the Earth

Yomi lies below the living world, a land of darkness where the dead go. It is not a place of judgment. No demons weigh souls here, no scales sort the righteous from the wicked. The dead pass into shadow, cut off from the world above. The Kojiki records one rule above all others: anyone who eats the food of Yomi's hearth cannot return.

The Descent

When Izanami died giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi, she descended here. Her husband Izanagi followed, calling out for her in the darkness until he found her in the gloom.

She told him she had already eaten the food of Yomi. She could not easily leave. But she would petition the gods of the underworld for permission, if he would wait and not look at her.

He agreed. He waited in the dark.

The Torch

His patience failed. He broke a tooth from the comb in his hair, lit it as a torch, and looked at his wife. Her body was rotting, crawling with maggots. Thunder kami had emerged from her decaying flesh: Ō-Ikazuchi, Great Thunder, at her head, and seven more down to Fushi-Ikazuchi, Crouching Thunder, at her right foot.

Izanami screamed that he had shamed her.

The Chase

She sent the Yomotsu-shikome after him, the fearsome hags of the underworld. Izanagi ran. He tore off his headdress and threw it behind him; it became wild grapes, and the hags stopped to devour them. He snapped the teeth from his comb and threw them; they became bamboo shoots that drew the pursuers again. Then Izanami sent the eight thunder kami and fifteen hundred warriors of the dead.

At the boundary between Yomi and the living world, a slope called Yomotsu Hirasaka, Izanagi found three peaches growing at the pass. He hurled them at his pursuers. The living fruit drove the dead back. He blessed the peaches and named them Ōkamuzumi-no-Mikoto.

Then he sealed the entrance with a massive boulder called Chibiki-iwa, so heavy a thousand men could not move it. From opposite sides of the stone, the estranged couple spoke their final words. Izanami swore she would kill a thousand of his people each day. He answered that he would cause fifteen hundred to be born.

In Higashiizumo, Shimane Prefecture, a large boulder in a mountain pass is still identified with Chibiki-iwa. A small shrine marks the spot.

The River at Hyūga

Izanagi emerged from Yomi contaminated with death. He traveled to a river mouth at Tachibana in Ahagi-hara in Hyūga to wash the pollution away. As he stripped off each garment, new kami emerged from the discarded clothing and the filth he scrubbed from his skin.

The culmination came when he washed his face. Amaterasu, the sun goddess, was born from his left eye. Tsukuyomi, the moon god, from his right. Susanoo, the storm god, came roaring from his nose.