The Story of Omoikane’s Wisdom
At a Glance
- Central figures: Omoikane, the kami of wisdom and thought; Amaterasu, the sun goddess; Susanoo, the storm god; and Ame-no-Uzume, the goddess of dawn and mirth.
- Setting: Takamagahara, the Heavenly Plain, and the entrance to the Amano-Iwato, the heavenly rock cave - from Shinto myth as recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki.
- The turn: After Susanoo’s rampage drives Amaterasu into a sealed cave and the world goes dark, the assembled gods call on Omoikane to devise a plan to bring her back out.
- The outcome: Omoikane’s scheme - mirror, dance, sacred offerings, and a rooster’s crow - draws Amaterasu to the cave entrance, where she catches sight of her own reflection and is pulled back into the light.
- The legacy: Amaterasu’s return restored sunlight to heaven and earth, and the Yata no Kagami used to lure her out became one of the three imperial treasures of Japan.
Susanoo had already done considerable damage before anyone thought to stop him. He broke the rice paddies. He filled in the irrigation ditches. He skinned a piebald colt and dropped its body through the roof of Amaterasu’s weaving hall. One of her maidens, startled, fell against her shuttle and died. Amaterasu said nothing about any of it. She walked into the Amano-Iwato - the heavenly rock cave - and rolled the boulder shut behind her.
The world went dark. Not dusk, not cloud cover - dark. The crops withered. Evil spirits moved through the silence where birdsong had been. In Takamagahara, the Heavenly Plain, eight million kami gathered at the entrance to the cave and stood there, considering the boulder.
The Problem Before the Gods
None of them could move it by force. That much was clear quickly enough. Amaterasu had not been kidnapped; she had chosen to withdraw, and whatever brought her back had to make that withdrawal feel unnecessary, even foolish. The gods needed to reach her through the boulder without touching it.
They sent for Omoikane. His name means something like “He Who Thinks of Many Things,” and the gathered kami had exhausted themselves thinking of one thing at a time. He arrived, looked at the sealed cave, and began asking questions - about what Amaterasu prized, about what she would find impossible to ignore, about the gap between what she could hear and what she could see.
He thought for a long time. The darkness continued.
Omoikane’s Design
What he put together had four parts, each one calculated for a different kind of attention.
First: the Yata no Kagami, the sacred mirror, forged by the craftsman god Ishikoridome. Omoikane had it hung on a sakaki branch directly in front of the cave entrance, at the height of a standing figure. The idea was simple - if Amaterasu opened the boulder even a crack, she would see light reflected back at her, and she would have to know what it was.
Second: Ame-no-Uzume. The goddess of dawn and mirth was given the area just in front of the cave, a wooden tub to stand on, and no instructions at all except to perform. What she did was both sacred and indecorous - a trance dance, rhythmic and escalating, that became stranger and funnier the longer it went on, until the gods watching were laughing so hard the sound of it rolled across the Heavenly Plain.
Third: the ritual offerings at the cave mouth - jewels, more sakaki branches, the kind of careful arrangement that signals reverence and occasion. Something was happening here worth attending to.
Fourth: the Niwatori, the heavenly rooster, whose crowing announces dawn whether the sun has risen or not. Omoikane placed it where it would crow at the right moment - a sound Amaterasu had heard at the beginning of every morning she had ever made.
The Dance Outside the Cave
Ame-no-Uzume danced. The laughter of eight million kami is not a quiet thing. It built and built, and inside the cave, sitting in absolute darkness, Amaterasu heard it.
This was not the sound of a world in crisis. This was celebration. Festivity. Whatever was happening out there had nothing to do with grief over her absence - or so it seemed. She could not understand it, and she could not stop listening to it, and finally she could not stay still.
She moved the boulder just enough to see.
The first thing she saw was the Yata no Kagami, hanging from the sakaki branch in the darkness, lit by the crack of light she had just made. She saw her own face in it - radiant, curious, leaning forward - and she leaned further to look, because it was difficult to tell at first glance whether she was seeing a reflection or another sun goddess entirely, standing just outside the cave and watching her back.
The Return of Light
While Amaterasu looked, the god Ame-no-Tajikarao - who had been waiting pressed against the rock wall - seized her by the wrist and pulled. The other gods rushed the entrance. Someone stretched a rope across it behind her so she could not go back inside even if she turned around.
She did not turn around. She stood in the open, still holding some of the warmth she had taken into the cave with her, and the world began to change immediately. Light came back to the rice paddies, to the sea, to the roads and mountains and sleeping faces of the earth. The evil spirits that had moved through the silence scattered.
The rooster had crowed. The mirror had done its work. Ame-no-Uzume was still dancing.
Omoikane at Takamagahara
Omoikane is invoked in Shinto as the kami of counsel - present at decisions, called on before plans are made, honored when complex problems require more than single-minded force. What the Amano-Iwato story preserves about him is not just that he was clever, but that his cleverness was precise: he had thought about what Amaterasu actually was, what she valued, what she could not resist, and he built his plan around those specific things rather than around what the gods themselves wanted to do.
The offerings at the cave mouth, the mirror, the rooster, the laughter - none of it was coercive. All of it was an argument. The argument was: something worth seeing is happening out here, and you are missing it.
She came out to look. The Yata no Kagami, which showed her her own light returned to her, passed eventually from the Heavenly Plain to the earth, where it remains among the imperial treasures - kept at the Ise Grand Shrine, the house of Amaterasu, where it has been tended without interruption since the beginning of the counted years.