Japan

Here’s a question I bet you’ve never asked yourself: Where do countries come from? We tend to take the land upon which we live as a given; it’s just there, so we stand on it, build on it and sometimes even fight over it. If we do consider it, we probably have a faint idea of rising magma and perhaps Pangea, but that’s about it. Life, however, wasn’t always that simple, and for earlier civilizations, the hows and the whys were a huge issue, and as such, they often invented stories to fill in the blanks of knowledge. It is unknown whether Japan’s story of creation comes from either a pre-literate Jōmon (c. 14,000 to 300 BCE) tradition, a Yayoi (300 BCE to 25 CE) tradition, or a combination of the two. Still, as far as creation stories go, as told in the 8th century CE Japanese anthology of mythology, the Kojiki, is quite a doozie. In the beginning… Back before the formation of the world, when ‘the land of reeds’ was young, floating in the universe like oil, the first kami [deities] came into existence at Takamagahara, the High Plain of Heaven. First came Amenominakanushi, ‘Lord of the August Center…