本州 Honshū

The Islands from the Spear

The Kojiki opens on the heavenly bridge: Izanagi and Izanami stir the ocean with the jewelled spear, and from the brine dripping from its point the first island coagulates. Descending, they wed and give birth to the islands of Japan — the "great eight islands" culminating in Ōyashima — and then to the kami of wind, sea, mountain, and tree. The archipelago is not created but born: the land is kin.

Amaterasu's Realm

When the sun goddess Amaterasu withdrew into the Heavenly Rock-Cave — outraged by her brother Susanoo's rampage — the world went dark until the gods' comic dance lured her out. Her mirror, hung outside the cave, caught her own light back to her; that mirror rests at Ise on Honshū's Kii coast, and her shrine there has been ritually rebuilt every twenty years for thirteen centuries: the island's heartwood, renewed.

Ninigi and the Rice Land

Amaterasu sent her grandson Ninigi down from heaven to rule the "Land of Fair Rice-ears of the Fertile Reed-plain" — the Kojiki's name for Honshū's heartland — bearing the three regalia. His great-grandson Jimmu conquered eastward to Yamato and became the first emperor: the mythic bridge from island-birth to imperial genealogy, anchored to real ground in Nara's basin.

Ōkuninushi Surrenders the Land

One more myth fixes Honshū's western half to the imperial story. When Amaterasu sent her grandson down to take the land, its ruler — Ōkuninushi, the great land-master of Izumo — was first challenged through his sons, each defeated in turn, and then visited by the divine negotiators with a counter-offer: yield the visible world to heaven's line, and in exchange heaven would build him a shrine 'with its pillars thick at the base and high at the head' and house his spirit there (Kojiki, age of the heavenly grandchild). Ōkuninushi accepted. The Nihon Shoki remembers the bargain as a settled diplomatic exchange — Japan's mythic account of how the western realms joined the Yamato order without a war of conquest. Izumo Taisha, on Honshū's Sea-of-Japan coast, stands where the deal was struck, and the vast pillars its ancient halls once held were, by tradition, exactly the size the god stipulated.

The myth is a charter for peaceful annexation: the land yields, the god is honored, and both houses — Izumo's shrine and the imperial palace — stand on the same island.