Tsukuyomi

Tsukuyomi is the moon kami of Japanese mythology, born from Izanagi's right eye during the purification ritual the creator god performed after his failed attempt to retrieve Izanami from the land of the dead. Along with Amaterasu, born from the left eye, and Susanoo, born from the nose, Tsukuyomi is counted among the three noble children, the most exalted of all the kami Izanagi produced. Beyond this account of birth, Tsukuyomi has a strikingly thin independent mythology compared to his siblings, but the one major story attached to him, told in the Nihon Shoki, is a pointed one. Sent to visit the food goddess Uke Mochi, Tsukuyomi watched her produce a lavish meal by turning to face the land, the sea and the mountains and disgorging rice, fish and game from her mouth, and in his revulsion at food produced this way he killed her on the spot. When Amaterasu learned what her brother had done, she was so appalled that she declared she never wished to see his face again, and from that day the sun and moon kami have never shared the sky, which the myth offers as the explanation for why day and night remain permanently separated. No comparable act of violence is recorded of either of his siblings toward a fellow kami, which makes Tsukuyomi's one substantial myth also the harshest, and it is this single episode, more than any sustained narrative, that defines his character across the whole of the surviving textual tradition.

Tsukuyomi's cult presence is smaller than that of his siblings Amaterasu and Susanoo, but it is real and it sits at the heart of Japan's most sacred Shinto site. Within the vast Ise Grand Shrine complex, the moon kami is enshrined at Tsukiyomi-no-miya, one of the auxiliary shrines, or betsugu, attached to the Outer Shrine, standing near the sanctuary of Amaterasu herself even though the myth of Uke Mochi tells of the two siblings' permanent estrangement. Additional shrines dedicated to Tsukuyomi exist elsewhere in Japan, including Tsukiyomi Shrine in the Matsunoo district of Kyoto and a shrine of the same name on Iki Island in Nagasaki Prefecture, a site with a strong local tradition connecting it to the historical origins of moon worship in Japan. Tsukuyomi's continued presence at Ise, quietly positioned beside the shrine complex built for his sister, reflects something the surviving texts leave unstated: the religious tradition never fully let go of the moon kami's standing even as the myths themselves gave him one of the coldest exits of any figure in the pantheon. That the tradition kept a place for him so close to his sister's own sanctuary, rather than omitting him after the myth's estrangement, suggests his standing among the three noble children was never seriously in doubt, whatever the Uke Mochi story says about the two siblings personally.