The Mystery of the Kuniumi Myth — The Deep Meaning Behind Izanagi and Izanami Birthing the Japanese Islands

What Is the Kuniumi Myth — Creation as Recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki

The Kuniumi ("birthing of the country") myth is the oldest narrative describing the origin of the Japanese archipelago, opening both the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE). After the parting of heaven and earth, five primordial heavenly deities emerged in Takamagahara, followed by seven generations of cosmic gods. The final pair to appear were Izanagi and Izanami, a divine couple who were commanded by the elder heavenly deities to "complete and solidify this drifting land." They were granted the Heavenly Jeweled Spear (Ame-no-Nuboko), and the story begins from this commission.

The two deities stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven (Ame-no-Ukihashi), lowered the spear into the ocean, and stirred the waters with a churning sound rendered onomatopoeically as "koworo-koworo." When they raised the spear, brine dripping from its tip piled up and congealed into the very first island. This was Onogoro Island, whose name means "the island that solidified of its own accord" — formed not by deliberate making but by spontaneous coagulation. The two deities descended onto this island, circled the Heavenly Pillar (Ame-no-Mihashira), performed the marriage rite, and only then began the true work of birthing the country.

What makes this myth so striking is that creation here is not framed as making something from nothing. Rather, it is described as "solidifying what already drifts" — giving form and order to material that already exists. Unlike the biblical "Let there be light," Japanese mythological creation is a process of arranging, congealing, and shaping. This reflects the worldview of an agricultural people who saw cosmic order as something achieved through cooperation with nature, not domination over it.

Where Is Onogoro Island — Competing Theories and Modern Candidates

One of the greatest mysteries of the Kuniumi myth is identifying where the first island, Onogoro, can be located in the real world. Several candidates have been proposed since antiquity, each with its own local traditions.

The most widely supported candidate is Nushima, a small island floating south of Awaji. With a coastline of roughly ten kilometers, Nushima features a striking thirty-meter-high pillar of rock called Kamitategami-iwa rising directly out of the sea on its southeastern shore. Local tradition holds that this very rock is the Heavenly Pillar where Izanagi and Izanami conducted their marriage rite. Residents have venerated this stone as a sacred body for centuries, and the Onokoro Shrine on the island places the Kuniumi myth at the center of its rituals. Geologically, Nushima is composed of Jurassic-period rocks roughly one hundred million years old and sits on a geological plate independent from the Japanese mainland — an interesting parallel to the myth's description of an island that "solidified of its own accord."

Another long-standing candidate is Eshima, a tiny rocky islet just off Iwaya Port at the northern tip of Awaji Island, well known to Heian-period poets as a poetic place-name. Other contenders include the inland Onokorojima Shrine on Awaji, Tomogashima in Wakayama, Shodoshima in Kagawa, and Kojima in Okayama — all asserting their identity as the "true" Onogoro Island. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio explained these competing locations as the result of a single mythic narrative being independently regenerated in countless small island communities. Coastal navigators in ancient Japan used isolated islets and rocks as landmarks, and each became remembered locally as their own Onogoro.

Hidden Meaning in the Birth Order of the Eight Great Islands

The most striking feature of the Kuniumi myth is the order in which the islands were born. According to the Kojiki, Izanagi and Izanami birthed the following eight islands in sequence: Awaji, Shikoku (Iyo-no-Futana-no-shima), the Oki Islands, Kyushu (Tsukushi-shima), Iki, Tsushima, Sado, and finally Honshu (Oyamato-Toyoakitsushima). Together these are called Oyashima — "the Eight Great Islands."

From a modern geographical perspective, this order seems puzzling. Why is the largest island, Honshu, listed last, while the much smaller Awaji comes first? Historians have long argued that this sequence reflects ancient maritime routes rather than physical geography. The political center of ancient Japan lay in the Nara Basin and the broader Kinai region. For navigators heading west from this heartland, the first island to come into view was Awaji. The route then continued through Shikoku, the Inland Sea islands, and on to Kyushu — the major maritime corridor of the era.

The Oki Islands and Sado, though peripheral, were recognized from antiquity as places of exile and as significant ritual sites. Tsushima and Iki served as critical waypoints for diplomacy and trade with the Korean Peninsula. The order of the eight islands, then, is not a simple geographical list but a kind of cognitive world map weighted by importance and travel routes. Honshu appears last because it was already understood as "Japan itself" — the totality, presented at the end of the sequence as a culminating summary.

The number eight also carries deep significance. In Japanese mythology, eight functions as a sacred number meaning "many" or "all." The eight million gods, the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi, the three-legged crow Yatagarasu, and the Yasakani-no-Magatama are all examples. "Oyashima" therefore carries a symbolic meaning beyond a literal count: it signifies a complete and whole national territory encompassing all the islands.

The First Failure — Hiruko and the Taboo of the Female Speaking First

Another enigmatic element of the Kuniumi myth is the episode in which the first attempt at creation fails. When Izanagi and Izanami first circled the Heavenly Pillar on Onogoro and conducted their marriage rite, the female deity Izanami spoke first, exclaiming, "How wonderful — what a fine man!" Izanagi then replied, "How wonderful — what a fine woman!" The union produced Hiruko, a child without proper bones, who was placed in a reed boat and set adrift. The next offspring was the incomplete island of Awashima, which likewise was not counted among their proper children.

The two deities returned to consult the heavenly gods, who performed the futomani divination and pronounced that "the woman speaking first was the cause of the failure." Returning to Onogoro, the couple repeated the ritual — this time with Izanagi speaking first and Izanami responding. Only after this corrected version did the Eight Great Islands begin to be born one after another.

This seemingly strange episode reflects the social structures and ritual logic of ancient Japan. First, the failure of the female-first speech mythologizes the importance of proper sequence in ancient marriage ceremonies. The principle that a procedural error nullifies a ritual is fundamental to Shinto practice. Second, the Hiruko tradition is connected to ancient beliefs surrounding children born with disabilities and was later transformed in regional folklore into stories of Ebisu — the deity of fortune. The Ebisu cult at Nishinomiya Shrine is rooted in the belief that the cast-away Hiruko returned from across the sea as a god of prosperity, a wonderful example of how a mythic "failure" generated an entirely new tradition of worship.

The Birth of the Gods and the Tragedy of Kagutsuchi

After completing the birthing of the eight islands, the divine couple went on to bring forth a host of gods. The sea god Owatatsumi, the wind god Shinatsuhiko, the tree god Kukunochi, the mountain god Oyamatsumi, the field goddess Kayanohime — deities governing every domain of nature emerged in succession. This is the systematic expression of the ancient Japanese worldview, an animism that perceives divinity in every natural phenomenon.

But when Izanami gave birth to Kagutsuchi, the god of fire, she was severely burned in the act and died in agony. In his fury, Izanagi drew his ten-grasp sword and struck Kagutsuchi down, then descended to Yomi-no-kuni, the land of the dead, in pursuit of his wife. This sets up the famous descent into Yomi episode that follows.

When I first read through the Kuniumi myth in full, I felt a small jolt of surprise that the very first island to be born was Awaji. Awaji is hardly a prominent island within the Japanese archipelago — why should the entire country begin from there? Looking at a map and turning it over in my mind, I gradually realized: located at the heart of the Inland Sea, Awaji was a hub of east-west maritime traffic for ancient peoples and would have felt, to them, like the very center of the world. Where the keepers of these stories stood when they imagined the world is quietly inscribed into the geography of the myth itself — a small, obvious realization that the text gently delivered.

The death of Kagutsuchi expresses a universal idea that creation always entails sacrifice. The story of fire — humanity's indispensable cultural foundation — being born at the cost of the mother goddess's death shows structural parallels with the Greek myth of Prometheus and the Norse stories of Loki. From the perspective of comparative mythology, these can be read as Japan's distinctive expression of a shared human theme: the origin myth of fire.

What the Kuniumi Myth Tells Us Today

The Kuniumi myth is not a dusty relic but a living substrate of the contemporary Japanese worldview.

First, this myth shaped the uniquely Japanese view that "the land itself is divine." The animistic perception that gods reside in every mountain, river, sea, rock, and tree of the archipelago is grounded in the idea — established in the Kuniumi narrative — that the islands and the gods are inseparable. The fact that many shrine sacred objects (goshintai) are themselves mountains, rocks, or ancient trees flows directly from this worldview. The use of Mount Miwa as the sacred body of Omiwa Shrine, the iwakura tradition of worshipping rocks, and sacred groves where the entire forest functions as the sanctuary all derive from the lineage of the Kuniumi myth.

Second, the myth offers a model of creation through dialogue and cooperation. In contrast to the lone creator deity of monotheism, the image of two gods generating a country through conversation and trial-and-error has functioned as a cultural archetype for consensus-building and collaborative work in Japanese society. The process of failing, consulting the heavenly gods, and trying again resembles an ideal model of organizational decision-making even by modern standards.

Third, shrines associated with the Kuniumi myth — Izanagi Jingu on Awaji, Onokorojima Shrine, and Onokoro Shrine on Nushima — continue to draw many pilgrims. Izanagi Jingu, which enshrines Izanagi himself, is regarded as the oldest shrine in Japan. Recent astronomical research has confirmed that the shrine sits at the precise center of a remarkable solar alignment connecting Ise Jingu, Izumo Taisha, and other major sacred sites along the paths of the summer solstice, winter solstice, spring equinox, and autumn equinox sunrises and sunsets. This strongly suggests that ancient peoples positioned the sacred ground of the Kuniumi myth as the spiritual center of the entire archipelago.

When we read the Kuniumi myth, we are not merely studying an old story. We are touching the bedrock of the country and the people of Japan. The ancient sensibility that solidified a drifting land with a spear, generated islands through dialogue, and saw divinity throughout nature still breathes within the landscapes of this archipelago, more than a millennium after the words were first set down.