Indeed, all in all it seems that we must regard Japan as having been a blessed land – as its mythology claims – throughout the rigours of the end of the Ice Age. For not only was it sheltered by its own topography from the worst effects of the post-glacial floods, but also it was screened from the most violent extremes of continental climate, thus enabling it to develop the lush and plentiful natural environment in which the Jomon could continue to pursue, across fourteen millennia, their near-idyllic lifestyle as affluent hunter-gatherers, fishermen, horticulturalists and, latterly, farmers.
I therefore do not find it surprising that Japan has no indigenous flood myth. On the contrary, it is exactly what I would expect of Japanese mythology if it is rooted and grounded in the myth-memories of the Jomon (no matter how disguised these may be beneath later influences). For what Japan actually lost during the post-glacial floods of the Jomon era were its ‘beachfront properties’ – including, I will endeavour to prove, several great coastal temples and sacred sites that now lie as much as 30 metres underwater. But it never lost its heart and soul to the rising seas nor was it ever smashed down to total destruction in the way that other areas of the world were.
Against such a background a strong flood myth would be anomalous.
Yet Japan, though ‘blessed’ in so many ways, did not entirely escape the upheavals of the meltdown epoch. We know, for example, that even here -though much reduced in frequency – the wild post-glacial climate flips did have their effects. Likewise, as was the case elsewhere around the world, we know that the 10,000 years after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum were accompanied in Japan by greatly increased volcanism.
I have seen evidence of the latter first-hand in early Jomon settlements such as Uenohara on Kyushu, where the ancient habitation layers are interspersed with thick carpets of volcanic ash. Moreover, I think most archaeologists specializing in the Jomon period would agree that in general their tasks of sequencing and stratigraphy are greatly facilitated by the presence of such volcanic layers in a great many Jomon sites around Japan.
So if the Kojiki, the Nihongi and the other ancient Japanese texts do preserve important Jomon memories alongside the many later ingredients which we know they also include, then it would be reasonable to expect that some of those memories might touch on the experience of volcanic and seismic cataclysms.
All interpretation of myth is speculative – mine and everybody else’s. But listen to the story of the ‘ravages’ or ‘havoc’ of Sosano-wo-no-Mikoto, the great Kami-deity called Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male.
The havoc of Sosano
The story is set in the Age of the Gods – more than 10,000 years ago as the chronicles inform us.24 Whether by coincidence or because it is a memory of those times, this places it in the midst of the epoch of post-glacial tumult.
We are to picture the storm god, Sosano. At this stage he is a young man ‘of a fierce temper and a wicked disposition’ with ‘an eight-hands-length beard’.25 He has been appointed to rule over the ‘Plain of Ocean’26 by his father Izanagi but, adult though he is, he remains disconsolate at the death of his mother Izanami many years before. Sosano will not accept her loss but howls and rages, howls and rages, seeking to join her in the Land of Yomi:27 ‘The fashion of his weeping was such as by his weeping to wither the green mountains into withered mountains and by his weeping to dry up all the rivers and seas.’28
To restore cosmic harmony Izanagi intervenes, ordering Sosano to remove himself from the earth. Sosano replies that he will go down to the Land of Yomi to join his mother but that first he wants to ascend to the High Plain of Heaven to bid farewell to his sister Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, the ‘Great-Sky-Shiner’:29
When Sosano went up to Heaven, by reason of the fierceness of his divine nature there was a commotion in the sea, and the hills and mountains groaned aloud. Amaterasu, knowing the violence and wickedness of this Deity, was startled and changed countenance, when she heard the manner of his coming.30
These are the words of the Nihongi. In the same vein the Kojiki tells us that during Sosano’s ascent ‘all the mountains and rivers shook, and every land and country quaked’.31 Likewise, both versions note alarming effects on the ‘countenance’ of the sun – Amaterasu’s hair stands out like a corona, or ‘in knots’, she winds ropes of curved magatama jewels around herself, she stamps her feet and sinks up to her thighs in the hard earth, which she kicks away ‘Like rotten snow’, and she utters a mighty cry of defiance.32
Sosano is offended:
From the beginning my heart has not been black. But as in obedience to the stern behest of our parents, I am about to proceed for ever to the Land of Yomi, how could I bear to depart without having seen face to face thee my elder sister? It is for this reason that I have traversed on foot the clouds and mists and have come hither from afar. I am surprised that my elder sister should, on the contrary, put on so stern a countenance.33
Amaterasu is mollified and a temporary calm descends upon the world. The two deities cooperate in the magical reproduction of further deities. But behind the scenes all is not well and Sosano’s troublesome nature is beginning to manifest again. The end result is a cataclysm so great that the sun disappears entirely from view. Here’s how the Nihongi tells the story:
Sosano’s behaviour was exceedingly rude … When he saw that Amaterasu was about to celebrate the feast of first fruits, he secretly voided excrement in the palace. Moreover, when he saw that Amaterasu was in her sacred weaving hall, engaged in weaving the garments of the Kami, he flayed a piebald colt of Heaven, and breaking a hole in the roof tiles of the hall, flung it in. Then Amaterasu started with alarm, and wounded herself with the shuttle. Indignant at this, she straightaway entered the Rock-cave of Heaven, and having fastened the Rock-door, dwelt there in seclusion. Therefore constant darkness prevailed on all sides, and the alternation of night and day was unknown.34
Most attempts by professional mythologists to explain this strange story are founded on the alleged ‘primitive’ fear that ancient peoples supposedly felt around the time of the winter solstice, during the shortest days of midwinter, that the sun would never return to its full power.35 Somehow Amaterasu’s disappearance into the rock-cave is to be taken as a symbol of this seasonal anxiety (which apparently our ancestors were too stupid to overcome), while her eventual re-emergence is naturally thought to symbolize the renewal of growth as the sun moves towards the spring equinox.
This is neat and tidy but in my view nonsense. People born in seasonal climes don’t need myths to tell them that winter will end! They know that already from their own life experience, from the experience of their siblings, from the experience of their parents. It’s obvious that fear is not the appropriate reaction to such a routine and predictable phenomenon. But fear is appropriate where terrible, infrequent and unpredictable disasters are concerned – disasters that shake the earth, roil the sea and blot out the sun from the sky in the violent and terrifying manner that the myths recount. It’s this sort of reasonable fear, connected to the geological and climatic violence that Sosano represents, that I think is reflected in the story of his ‘ravages’ and of the darkening of the sun.
As usual the language of the Kojiki is slightly different from that of the Nihongi and adds texture to the same tale. After Amaterasu has retired within her cave and made fast its rock-door, we read:
The whole Plain of High Heaven was obscured and all the Central Land of Reed-Plains darkened. Owing to this, eternal night prevailed. Hereupon the voices of the evil36 Kami were like unto the flies in the fifth moon as they swarmed, and a myriad portents of woe all arose.37
This sounds more like the end of the world to me than the winter solstice! Or if not in fact the end of the world, then something that obviously felt very much like it to those living at the time. Surely what the texts are asking us to envisage here is not less than a sustained period of cataclysm during which the whole land of Japan was plunged into ‘constant darkness’. And if so, then is
it coincidence, or because the texts contain a true report, that cataclysms of this magnitude did occur in Japan during the meltdown of the Ice Age when earthquakes and volcanic activity were at their peak? Even the relatively puny volcanic eruptions of the modern era have been known to darken skies across whole regions and provoke intimations of the end of the world.38 How much more likely it is that the multiple large-scale eruptions that Japan experienced in the Jomon era could from time to time have combined their effects to produce a total blackout of the skies and real fears of the onset of ‘eternal night’.
Even the longest volcanic winter does end, however. So as we would expect with such a scenario Amaterasu eventually does emerge from her rock-cave. She is tempted forth by some wonderful commotion and trickery of her fellow Kami, which need not detain us here, and once again: ‘The radiance of the Sun Goddess filled the universe.’39
But the story is not yet over. What is to be done with the rebellious Sosano, who caused all this trouble in the first place? The assembled Kami would have their revenge on him. He is fined heavily. His toenails and fingernails are pulled out. His beard is cut:
After this the Kami upbraided Sosano, saying ‘Thy conduct has been in the highest degree improper. Thou must, therefore, not dwell in Heaven. Nor must thou dwell in the Central Reed-Plain Land. Thou must go speedily to the Bottom Nether Land [the Land of Yomi].’ So together they drove him away downwards.
Now this was a time of continuous rains …40
Remember that all interpretation of myth is speculative, but in summary, if we storyboard the ravages of Sosano, I suggest we get something like the following:
A period of extremely arid climate during which the ‘green mountains’ become ‘withered mountains’ and the rivers and seas dry up. Comment: a good, shorthand description of conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum, when global sea-level was at its lowest and north-east Asia, along with many other parts of the world, experienced thousands of years of extreme aridity.41
A commotion in the sea; mountains and rivers shake and groan. Commerit: the meltdown has begun in earnest; as the earth’s crust readjusts under the changing stresses Japan experiences earthquakes of phenomenal intensity and its network of colossal volcanoes grows restless.
A change in the countenance of the sun: the episode of the piebald colt. Comment: atmospheric effects from increased volcanism.
The disappearance of the sun into the ‘Rock-cave of Heaven’. Comment: skies darkened and sun obscured by massive volcanic eruptions and prolonged local volcanic fallout combined with global circulation of ash in the upper atmosphere.
Return of the sun followed by a period of continuous rains. Comment: the sky clears, the sun is seen again; as the meltdown of the far-off ice-sheets continues and more water is made available for atmospheric circulation, global precipitation increases and Japan experiences heavy rains after a long period of drought.42
So, yes, I am speculating. And, yes, I do realize that there might be dozens of other far more worthy explanations. Yet Japan did pass through such conditions at the end of the Ice Age.
And the Jomon were there to experience them.
The Land of Yomi
Sosano’s long-running story does not quite end even with his expulsion from heaven. Contrary to the command of the assembled Kami, he has deeds to do on earth before he joins his mother Izanami in the Land of Yomi. Most of these are good deeds and feature the killing of an eight-headed serpent-monster that threatens a damsel in distress and the recovery from its tail of an Excalibur-like sword.43 After having married the damsel and produced more children, ‘Sosano-wo-no-Mikoto at length proceeded to the Land of Yomi.’44
This brings me back to the point at which I started this chapter – the mysterious journey to the Underworld, to the enchanted island, to the Kingdom of the Sea King, that recurs in the Japanese myths.
Sosano’s case touches only tangentially on the issue. It is the story of his mother, the great procreator goddess Izanami (She-Who-Invites) and of his father Izanagi (He-Who-Invites) that will lead us along the correct path. Izanami and Izanagi are the archetypal divine couple, progenitors of gods and men, whom we first encounter in the ancient texts standing on the ‘Floating Bridge of Heaven’, gazing down into the swirling, oily, cloud-covered mass of the primeval universe in formation:
Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven, and held counsel together saying: ‘Is there not a country beneath?’
Thereupon they thrust down the jewel-spear of Heaven, and groping about therewith found the ocean. The brine which dripped from the point of the spear coagulated and became the island which received the name Ono-goro-Jima [’Spontaneously-congealed-island’; identified with a small island near Ahaji].
The two Deities thereupon descended and dwelt in this island. Accordingly they wished to become husband and wife together, and to produce countries.
So they made Ono-goro-Jima the pillar of the centre of the land.45
It is impossible to pass such symbolism as ‘the pillar of the centre of the land’ without noting its obvious family resemblance to the notion of the omphalos or ‘navel-of-the-earth’, found as far afield as ancient Peru, Easter Island, India, ancient Egypt and Greece. I have discussed this problem in earlier chapters and in another work,46 and will not repeat myself; still, the sense of an intrusion into the Nihongi’s text at this point of what many as well as myself believe to have been an international geodetic technical terminology is overwhelming.
As well as the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and her troublesome brother Sosano, Izanagi and Izanami become the parents of many other children, several of whom are islands (perhaps even the islands of post-glacial Japan that were formed by rising sea-levels?), while others are Kami of every variety.
In a curious episode, the first-born of the divine couple is described as a leech-child (later identified with the god Yebisu),47 whom ‘they straightaway placed in a reed boat and set adrift’.48 And just as Sosano’s killing of the serpent to rescue a damsel in distress recalls the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda, so too this story of a child set adrift in a reed vessel has bizarre similarities to the stories of well-known civilizing heroes who were ‘saved from water’ in the same way – such as Moses in the Old Testament and Sargon the Great of Mesopotamia, who claimed in the third millennium BC:
My mother was a priestess. I did not know my father. The priestess, my mother, conceived me and gave birth to me in hiding. She placed me in a basket made of reeds and closed the lid with pitch. She put the basket in the river … The river carried me away.49
Returning to the myths of Japan, the last of Izanami’s children is the fire-god Kagu-tsuchi (Fire-Shining-Swift-Male).50 As he enters the world her uterus is burnt and soon afterwards she sickens, dies and her spirit travels to the Land of Yomi.51
Now, another scene from universal myth unfolds – here powerfully reminiscent of the Underworld quests of Orpheus for Eurydice and of Demeter for Persephone.52 The ancient Japanese recension of this mysteriously global story is given in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, where we read that Izanagi, mourning for his dead wife, followed after her to the Land of Yomi in an attempt to bring her back to the world of the living:
Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto and entered the Land of Yomi … So when from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, Izanagi spoke saying; ‘My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!’53
Izanami is honoured by Izanagi’s attention, and minded to return. But there is one problem. She has already eaten food prepared in the Land of Yomi and this binds her to the place, just as the consumption of a single pomegranate seed binds Persephone to hell in the Greek myth.54
Is it an accident that ancient Indian myth also contains the same idea? In the Katha Upanishad a human, Nachiketas, succeeds in visiting the underworld realm of Yama, the Hindu god of Death (and, yes, scholars have noted and commented upon the
weird resonance between the names and functions of Yama and Yomi).55 It is precisely to avoid detention in the realm of Yama that Nachiketas is warned:
Three nights within Yama’s mansion stay
But taste not, though a guest, his food.56
So there’s a common idea here – in Japan, in Greece, in India – about not eating food in the Underworld if you want to leave. Such similarities can result from common invention of the same motif – in other words, coincidence. They can result from the influence of one of the ancient cultures upon the other two, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or they can result from an influence that has somehow percolated down to all three, and perhaps to other cultures, stemming from an as yet unidentified common source.
The parallel idea of not looking or not looking back after a successful quest in the Underworld is strong in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In their case Eurydice, killed by a snakebite, is permitted to return to life after Orpheus has journeyed to the land of the dead to find her. But there is a condition: neither he nor she should look back as they depart the Underworld: ‘The couple climbed up toward the opening into the land of the living, and Orpheus, seeing the sun again, turned back to share his delight with Eurydice. In that moment, she disappeared.’57
The Japanese recension passed down to us from unknown antiquity in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki is hauntingly different and yet hauntingly the same. The reader will recall that Izanagi has reached the Land of Yomi and has just addressed Isanami: ‘My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!’ And she has informed him that she has eaten food cooked in the Underworld and thus cannot depart: ‘My lord and husband, why is thy coming so late? I have already eaten of the cooking furnace of Yomi.’58 Nevertheless, she says that she will return within and discuss the matter with the resident Kami. Perhaps an exception can be made and she can be freed. But she issues one warning: ‘Look not at me!’59