Japanese Mythology: Gods, Yokai and the Stories Behind Them

The sun goddess sulked in a cave and the world went dark. The other gods tried reason, then bribery, and neither worked. What finally drew her out was a raucous dance performed by another goddess on an upturned tub, and the sound of eight hundred deities laughing so hard that Amaterasu opened the door to see what she was missing. Then they blocked it behind her.

Japanese mythology comes mainly from two eighth-century chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, which record the creation of the islands, the kami who inhabit them, and the imperial line's descent from Amaterasu. Running alongside that is a much larger body of folklore: yokai, tricksters, ghosts, and the talking animals who still turn up in anime.

Japanese Mythology

Where Japanese mythology comes from

The Kojiki, compiled in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, from 720, are the primary sources. Both were commissioned by the imperial court, which shaped what they contain: they establish a continuous line from the gods to the emperor, and that political purpose is visible throughout.

They are not a single coherent system. Regional traditions, Buddhist imports from the sixth century onward, Chinese cosmology, and local folk belief all fold into what people now call Japanese mythology.

Shinto, the indigenous religion, has no founder, no scripture in the Abrahamic sense, and no strong moral code. What it has is kami: spirits or presences that inhabit natural things and remarkable people. There are said to be eight million of them, a number that means countless rather than counted.

The creation myth

Izanagi and Izanami, a brother and sister pair of deities, stood on the floating bridge of heaven and stirred the ocean with a jeweled spear. The drops that fell from the tip formed the first island.

They descended, married, and gave birth to the islands of Japan and to many kami. Izanami died giving birth to the fire god, and Izanagi followed her to Yomi, the land of the dead, to bring her back. He was told not to look at her, looked anyway, saw her decomposing, and fled. She pursued him in fury, and he sealed the entrance with a boulder.

The parallels with Orpheus and Eurydice are obvious and unexplained.

Purifying himself afterward, Izanagi produced three more deities: Amaterasu from his left eye, Tsukuyomi the moon god from his right, and Susanoo the storm god from his nose.

The major kami

Amaterasu

Amaterasu

The sun goddess and the most important deity in Shinto, from whom the imperial family claims descent. Her main shrine is Ise Jingu, and the sacred mirror said to be hers is one of the three imperial regalia.

The cave story is the central myth. Her brother Susanoo's destructive behavior drove her to hide in the Ama-no-Iwato cave, plunging the world into darkness, until the assembled gods lured her out with a dance and a mirror.

Susanoo

The storm god, brother to Amaterasu, and the closest thing Japanese mythology has to a chaotic antihero. Expelled from heaven for wrecking his sister's rice fields, he descended to Izumo, killed the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi, and found a sword in its tail. That sword, Kusanagi, is another of the three imperial regalia.

Inari

The kami of rice, agriculture, prosperity and, by extension, business. More than a third of all Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to Inari, including Fushimi Inari in Kyoto and its shrines with its thousands of torii gates.

Inari is variously depicted as male, female, or androgynous, and is served by fox messengers, which is why fox statues stand at the entrances.

Others worth knowing

Tsukuyomi, the moon god, who killed a food goddess and was banished by Amaterasu, which is why the sun and moon never share the sky. Hachiman, god of war and protector of Japan. Ebisu, Daikokuten and the rest of the Seven Lucky Gods, a syncretic group drawn from Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese Taoism.

Yokai

Yokai

Yokai is the broad term for supernatural creatures in Japanese folklore, covering everything from genuinely frightening monsters to household objects that come alive after a hundred years.

The category is enormous, and the Edo-period artist Toriyama Sekien listed hundreds of them in illustrated encyclopedias that fixed their appearances in the popular imagination.

Tengu

Tengu

Mountain spirits with red faces and long noses, originally bird-like and later more human. Tengu are associated with martial skill and with the mountain ascetics of Shugendo, and they appear in stories both as dangerous abductors and as teachers of swordsmanship.

Kappa

Green, roughly child-sized water spirits with a dish of water on top of the head, which is their weak point: spill it and they lose their power. They drown people and steal cucumbers, and bowing to one forces it to bow back and empty the dish, which is a very Japanese solution.

Kitsune

Kitsune

Foxes, and among the most significant creatures in Japanese folklore. A kitsune gains a tail with age up to nine, growing in power and wisdom. They shapeshift, usually into women, and stories about them range from devoted wives to vengeful tricksters.

Kitsune serve Inari, which places them at the intersection of folklore and formal religion.

Tanuki

Raccoon dogs, and the comic counterpart to the kitsune. Tanuki are shapeshifters too, but cheerful, gluttonous and famously well endowed, which folk art depicts without embarrassment. The statues outside restaurants carry a sake flask and a promissory note, representing generosity and unpaid debts.

Oni

Ogres with horns, wild hair and tiger-skin loincloths, usually red or blue. They appear as antagonists in dozens of tales and are the demons thrown out during the Setsubun bean-throwing ritual each February.

Yurei

Ghosts, typically women in white burial kimono with long black hair and no feet, held in the world by a grievance. The template for Sadako in Ring and for most of the Japanese horror that followed.

The folk tales

Momotaro

Momotaro

An elderly couple find a giant peach floating down a river, and inside it a boy. He grows up, sets off to fight the oni on their island, and recruits a dog, a monkey and a pheasant along the way by sharing his millet dumplings. It is the most widely known story in Japan and every child learns it.

Urashima Taro

A fisherman rescues a turtle and is taken to the dragon palace beneath the sea, where he spends what feels like three days with the princess Otohime. She sends him home with a box he must never open. On shore, three hundred years have passed, everyone he knew is dead, and when he opens the box he ages instantly into an old man.

Kaguya-hime

The bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl inside a stalk. She grows into a woman of extraordinary beauty, rejects five noble suitors and the emperor, and finally reveals that she comes from the moon and must return. It is Japan's oldest surviving narrative, and Studio Ghibli filmed it.

The crane wife

A man frees a trapped crane. A woman arrives and marries him, weaving beautiful cloth on condition he never watches. He watches, sees the crane plucking her own feathers, and she leaves. The taboo-and-violation structure runs through a great deal of Japanese folklore.

Where to see the mythology

Fushimi Inari in Kyoto for the fox shrines and the torii. Ise Jingu for Amaterasu. Izumo Taisha in Shimane, where by tradition all the kami of Japan gather each October, making that the one month called "the month without gods" everywhere else.

Ama-no-Iwato shrine in Miyazaki claims the cave from the Amaterasu story, and Takachiho Gorge nearby stages nightly kagura performances of the myth.

The Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato, Tottori, is lined with bronze yokai statues honoring the manga artist who did more than anyone to keep yokai in the modern imagination.

Our roundup of Japan's major temples and shrines covers the practical side of visiting, and our guide to Ise Grand Shrine goes deeper on the Amaterasu connection.

Why it still matters

This is not dead mythology. People buy fox-shaped ema at Inari shrines, throw beans at oni in February, and avoid certain numbers and directions for reasons rooted in old belief.

It also drives an enormous amount of modern culture. Spirited Away is populated almost entirely by yokai and kami. Pokémon draws on the same bestiary. Princess Mononoke is a Shinto argument about what people owe the natural world.

Understanding the mythology makes a great deal of Japanese art, film and architecture legible in a way it otherwise is not. Our piece on Japanese films and their directors follows that thread into cinema, and Setsubun is the festival where the oni still get thrown out once a year.

For a route that takes in the shrines where these stories are anchored, a fortnight across central Japan passes most of them.