Amaterasu

Everything in this collection that happens after dark can be traced back to one afternoon when the sun quit.

Amaterasu is the sun goddess, the highest deity in the Japanese pantheon, and her brother Susanoo — the storm — pushed her past what she could take. He wrecked her rice fields. He broke the irrigation channels. He fouled her hall. And finally he threw a flayed horse through the roof of the weaving house where her attendants worked, killing one of them.

So she left. She went into a cave in the rock, rolled a boulder across the entrance, and stayed there. And because she is not a symbol of the sun but the sun itself, heaven and earth went dark. Crops failed. Evil spirits came up and filled the silence with noise. The world simply stopped working.

Eight hundred myriad gods gathered outside that cave to work out what to do.

What actually got her out

They did not break the door down. Nobody tried force, and nobody, in the end, tried prayer.

They threw a party.

They set up a sakaki tree outside the cave and hung it with strings of curved jewels and white streamers of cloth, and — the crucial item — a mirror. They brought roosters to crow at a dawn that wasn't coming. And then Ame-no-Uzume, a goddess of no great rank, turned a tub upside down, climbed onto it, and began to dance, stamping on the wood until it boomed, working herself into a state and pulling off her clothes in front of everyone.

The assembled gods of Japan roared with laughter. Eight hundred myriad divine beings, standing in total darkness, howling.

And inside the cave, the sun got curious.

She slid the rock aside a crack and asked how they could possibly be enjoying themselves with the world in darkness. Uzume called back that they had found a goddess greater than her — and turned the mirror to face the gap.

Amaterasu had never seen her own reflection. She leaned out to look at the radiant stranger. And Tajikarao, the strongman god waiting beside the door, took her by the wrist and pulled.

The moment she was out, a rope of twisted rice straw went up across the cave mouth behind her, and she was told she could not go back. That rope was the first shimenawa — the sacred boundary marker you now see strung across shrine gates and around ancient trees all over Japan. It was invented in that instant, to stop the sun going back to bed.

Why this is the most important story here

Look at what worked. Not a siege, not a plea, not a sacrifice. Laughter, a show, and her own face.

That is the operating manual for the entire tradition. Every festival that answers a bad year with drums and masks, every kagura dance that drives demons out by performing at them, every night of ghost stories told in a circle by candlelight — all of it is that scene, run again. Japan's response to darkness was set at that cave mouth and it has not fundamentally changed in three thousand years: you do not fight the dark. You make something so worth looking at that the light comes out to see it.

And note who the supreme deity of Japan actually is. Not a conqueror. Not a smiter. She is someone who was hurt badly enough to shut herself away, and who was coaxed back out by her family, with a joke.

The mirror kept going

The mirror they used to trick her became Yata-no-Kagami, one of the three imperial regalia of Japan. It is kept at Ise, in the innermost shrine, and it has never been photographed — correctly, because that is the point of it.

The other two regalia are a jewel and a sword, and the sword was cut out of the tail of an eight-headed serpent by Susanoo himself, by way of apology. Through her grandson Ninigi, sent down to rule the islands, the line runs to the first emperor and every emperor after.

Which gives Japan's imperial house the most extraordinary set of founding objects in the world: a mirror that tricked the sun out of a cave, a sword pulled from a monster's corpse, and a bloodline whose grandmother was a sea-dragon.