Asuka

Every mythological cycle in the world has to come down somewhere.

The Greek myths come down at the Trojan War — a story that is half-mythological, half-historical, set in a real city beside a real sea. The Norse myths come down through the Heimskringla, where the kings of Norway trace their bloodline to Odin himself. The Hindu Mahabharata comes down at Kurukshetra, an actual battlefield where archaeology and legend lay over each other.

The Kojiki comes down here, in Asuka.

The march east

After three generations of heavenly grandchildren ruling from Kyushu, a fifth-generation descendant of Amaterasu sets out from the western islands with a fleet, a brother, and an ambition. He is called Jimmu (神武).

He sails east through the Inland Sea. He fights petty kings on the way through Osaka and Kumano. His brother is killed by an arrow. A three-legged crow, sent by the heavenly gods, leads him over the mountains. He emerges into a wide, fertile basin in the centre of the largest island.

The basin is the Yamato Plain. He builds a palace at Kashihara (橿原), at the foot of Unebi mountain, and is crowned. The traditional date is 660 BCE.

The Kojiki’s mythological arc closes here. The chronicle itself continues — for thirty more generations of emperors, all the way down to the seventh century. But the world it describes from this point on is no longer one of gods stepping out of caves. It is one of armies, marriages, and dated reigns.

What changes at Asuka

From Awaji to Ise, the Kojiki has been the story of kami — gods, with their own names and personalities, acting on a cosmic stage. From Asuka onward, it becomes the story of emperors. The figures keep getting more historical, less mythological. Reigns are dated. Battles have witnesses. The text begins to feel less like a creation story and more like an early chronicle.

Asuka is the hinge. It is where myth, having spent itself across four regions of the archipelago, finally lands in a real place and becomes a country.

Where to walk

Asuka itself is a small village in central Nara prefecture, ringed by low hills, threaded by rice paddies and ancient burial mounds. It is one of the most quietly significant landscapes in Japan, and almost entirely unvisited by foreign travellers.

• Kashihara Jingu (橿原神宮) — the great shrine commemorating Jimmu’s coronation, built in 1890 at the traditional site of his palace. The torii at sunrise is one of the most haunting sights in Yamato.
• Asuka-dera (飛鳥寺) — Japan’s oldest Buddhist temple, founded in 588 CE, its great seated Buddha cast in 609. The bridge between mythological Japan and the historical Buddhist state that follows.
• Ishibutai Kofun (石舞台古墳) — a massive megalithic tomb chamber in a quiet field, attributed to the powerful Soga clan. Stand inside it and feel the weight of stones placed by the same generations who first wrote the Kojiki down.
• Mount Unebi (畝傍山) — the small, perfectly conical mountain at the foot of which Jimmu was crowned. Hike it in under an hour. From the top, see the entire basin where Japan, by tradition, began.

The end of the trail

Read in any order. But if you read all five volumes in sequence — Awaji, Izumo, Takachiho, Ise, Asuka — you will travel the full arc of the world’s oldest continuously practiced mythology, from the moment a spear stirred the ocean to the moment a country settled into the ground that the gods had given it.

Few places in the world let you walk that arc with your feet. This region is where it ends.