Amaterasu

And it's the death, I am fulfilling the promise that Tom made with the Japanese people to be their chosen one.

I am Amaterasu, come again.

And yeah, I've watched the movie many times.

I love it.

of Buddha.

Yeah, so, right, clearly there's a destiny angle going on here as well.

Is Tom the chosen one? Am I the chosen one? I am the reincarnation of Amaterasu who will set the Japanese people free.

So, yeah, wait, that's going to be quite an episode of Internet Genius.

Today, the Japanese imperial envoy has traveled to the Grand Shrine with a critical assignment to pray for victory against the impending second Mongol invasion.

The envoy walks to the shrine of Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun and mythical ancestor of the imperial family.

There he worships with the chief priestess and prays for the defeat of the Mongols.

The envoy also requests that the priestess record a curse, punishing the Mongols for threatening Japan and the emperor.

And this is a, it's one of these fun stories where you have, uh, Susanoo, who was a storm god.

He was the brother of the sun goddess, uh, Amaterasu.

He's banished from the high plain of heaven after a series of destructive pranks against his sister.

Oh, what a trickster.

And in Japanese mythology, Tsukuyomi is a Shinto moon god born from the right eye of the creator deity Izanagi.

He is the counterpart to Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun, who was born from Izanagi's left eye.

Ooh, what a mouthful.

So while the details differ enormously, right, culture to culture, there's very clearly recurring patterns of all of these ancient peoples and old mythology trying to explain and understand the patterns of the moon.

I think it's down about an hour outside of Os- hour and a half, two hours outside Osaka.

Uh, it's called Ise Jingu, and it's the main Amaterasu sun goddess shrine.

I'm telling you this because when I went there, I did not know this until I went to the shrine and then went to the museum afterwards, and the central shrine, the main shrine, is incredibly beautiful.

It's all made out of wood.

So, of course, that's what I saw.

I never saw the sun goddess Amaterasu because I didn't even know what Japan was when I was a child.

So there's no way I could have seen the Japanese sun goddess.

I have no context for that.

Um.

Now, if you've been following this series, you might be thinking, like, wait a minute, what about Amaterasu? What about Susanoo? Like, what about all of these other deities that we've talked about? Yes, they are kami as well.

So Amaterasu, for example, is one of the most important kami in Shinto tradition and is associated with the sun.

There's so many of them, but they all, if you think about the stories that we shared, have something to do with nature or life or the ancestors.

Amaterasu is associated with the sun.

Susunoo is associated with the storms and sea.

Inari... associated with rice agriculture and prosperity and all of these deities and some of the other kami as well have shrines in your head you can imagine with me the architecture that we've seen in so many like Japanese artwork I think we even used it in the artwork for our folklore series episode um it's the red shrines with the red gates with the um kind of swooping rooftops they're called um tori gates those shrines are mostly dedicated to inari another familiar feature of inari shrines are foxes or kitsune um And it's another reason why the concept of kami doesn't always fit into our usual categories.

So like they can be associated with particular shrines and kami and have deep connections to the local community and like natural area.