Tsukuyomi

Tsukuyomi is the Shinto moon god, born, in the Kojiki account, from the right eye of the creator Izanagi as the god purified himself, at the same moment that his radiant sister Amaterasu, the sun, was born from the left eye and their turbulent brother Susanoo from the nose. Sent up into the heavens to join Amaterasu and to rule the night beside her rule of the day, Tsukuyomi is at first her companion in the sky. Yet, unusually for so significant a figure, he has almost no mythology of his own, and the single story told of him serves mainly to explain why the sun and moon are no longer seen together. In that story, Amaterasu sends Tsukuyomi down as her representative to the food goddess Ukemochi, who prepares a feast by drawing food from her own body, from her mouth, the sea and the land.

Tsukuyomi, disgusted at being offered food produced in this way and taking it as a defilement, kills the food goddess. When he returns and reports what he has done, Amaterasu is filled with anger at so terrible an act and declares that she will never again look upon him face to face, and so, the myth explains, the sun and the moon dwell apart, the one ruling the day and the other the night, forever separated and never seen together in the sky. (A closely related version of the food-goddess killing is told of Susanoo instead, one of several places where the early chronicles preserve variant traditions.) Tsukuyomi is thus the divine embodiment of the moon and of the night, remembered above all for the estrangement that set the two great lights of heaven forever on their separate courses.

Despite Tsukuyomi's thin presence in the mythological narratives, his cult is attested unusually early and specifically on the small island of Iki, between Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, where a shrine to him, Tsukiyomi Jinja, is recorded among the important shrines listed in the tenth century Engishiki, the imperial compilation that catalogued officially recognized shrines and their ritual status across Japan. Iki's ancient inhabitants, the Iki clan, served the early Yamato court as professional diviners, and some scholars connect the island's prominent moon cult to this role, since the moon's regular phases made it a natural object of calendrical and divinatory attention for a community whose livelihood depended on reading omens and reckoning time.

A related shrine bearing the same name stands today in Kyoto, historically connected to the great Matsunoo Taisha, and tradition holds that the Kyoto shrine's founding is itself linked back to the older Iki cult, brought to the capital region as the Yamato state's religious geography expanded and centralized around the capital. Whatever the precise historical chain connecting these sites, honestly difficult to reconstruct in full from the fragmentary early sources, the persistence of dedicated shrines to a deity so nearly silent in the narrative mythology is a reminder that cult worship and mythological storytelling did not always develop at the same pace in early Japanese religion; a god who barely speaks in the Kojiki could still have held a real, named, ritually maintained place on the sacred map of the country.