Ame-no-Minakanushi, the name means the Lord of the August Centre of Heaven or Master of the Centre of Heaven, is, in the account of the Kojiki, the very first kami to come into being at the origin of the cosmos, appearing alone in the High Plain of Heaven when heaven and earth first divided. He heads the group known as the three creator kami (the zoka no sanshin), the first deities who arise at the beginning, and he is described as a solitary deity who came into existence and then concealed himself, without myth or offspring.
In the oldest texts he is thus an abstract, remote first principle, the still centre at the origin of things, rather than an actively worshipped god, and for much of Japanese history he received little popular devotion, overshadowed by the vivid and story-rich deities who came after him. His importance grew later and largely through interpretation: in the medieval and especially the early-modern periods, thinkers of various Shinto schools, and later the scholars of Kokugaku (National Learning) and a number of new religious movements, took up Ame-no-Minakanushi as a supreme, central creator-deity, sometimes identifying him with the cosmic first principle or drawing him toward a more monotheistic conception of a single origin of all things. He is a good example of a deity who is prominent at the very head of the mythological record yet nearly silent within it, and whose significance was drawn out chiefly by later theology reaching back to the first name in the Kojiki as the source of everything that followed.