Kuninotokotachi is one of the first and most primordial of the Shinto kami, an eternal deity who, in the account of the Nihon Shoki, emerges alone at the founding of the earth and stands as a hidden, abiding foundation beneath the world. In the earliest myths he is, like the other first kami, an abstract and self-effacing figure: he appears at the very beginning, among the deities who arise before the generative pair Izanagi and Izanami, and he is described as a solitary god who conceals himself, without narrative or descendants of his own. He belongs to the primordial ground of things rather than to the storied world of the later gods. Like several such first deities, however, Kuninotokotachi took on far greater importance in later theology than his slight role in the myths would suggest.
In the medieval and early-modern periods he was elevated by influential schools of Shinto thought, notably the Yoshida (or Yuiitsu) Shinto tradition, to the rank of a supreme, eternal, foundational deity, sometimes treated as the ultimate origin and cosmic principle underlying all existence, an unchanging ground of the universe. This later exaltation is a clear instance of a recurring pattern in the history of Shinto: the abstract, nearly silent first kami of the ancient chronicles are taken up by later thinkers seeking a single supreme principle, and are raised to the summit of the pantheon as the eternal source from which the world proceeds. Kuninotokotachi stands as the divine name for the enduring, hidden foundation on which the land itself rests.