The age of creation in Japanese mythology: Analysis of several latent motifs in Kojiki

Abstract

It is well known that the earliest Japanese mythological codices, that is, Kojiki and Nihon shoki, contain several versions of the creation myth. For instance, the creative activity of Izanaki and Izanami who gave birth to deities, land, luminaries, rivers, mountains and so on can be perceived as such. Also, some phenomena and deities appeared and evolved by themselves before the two main deities, while after them the divine pair of Amaterasu and Susanoo produced some deities by crunching a magatama necklace. The object of this paper is to look into several motifs, which seem to be of secondary importance in the Kojiki narrative, but which — if viewed as typologically similar to the creation myths of other mythologies — reveal their latent nature as signifcant refections of yet other types of cosmological ideas, central for creation myths in other cultures, particularly those in East and South Asia.