Awaji

The Kojiki opens with a creation. Two gods — Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, husband and wife — stand on the floating bridge of heaven and look down at the formless sea below.

They are given a spear. They lower it into the brine. They stir.

When the spear is raised, droplets fall from its tip. The first drop congeals into an island. They name it Onogoro — the self-curdled isle. They descend onto it, build a pillar, walk around it in opposite directions, meet on the far side, marry, and begin the work of bearing children. The children, in this telling, are islands.

The first true island they bear is Awaji.

Why Awaji is the door

For most travellers in Japan, Awaji is a place to drive past — the bridge from Kobe to Shikoku, an hour of coastline glimpsed from the highway. For readers of the Kojiki, it is something else entirely. It is the threshold. The first earthly place. The doorway through which the gods step into the human world.

Three sites on the island anchor this opening myth:

• Eshima (絵島) — a small, tilted islet just off Awaji’s northern coast at Iwaya, identified as Onogoro by the Edo-period scholar Motoori Norinaga. The first land. The islet itself is currently closed to visitors due to the risk of rockfall, but its weathered, leaning form can be seen clearly from the harbour shore.
• Onokoro Jinja (おのころ島神社) — the shrine dedicated to Izanagi and Izanami, set inland near where Awaji’s central rice plains begin. Its towering 21.7-metre vermilion torii is counted among the three great torii of Japan, alongside those of Heian Jingu in Kyoto and Itsukushima in Hiroshima.
• Izanagi Jingu (伊弉諾神宮) — Izanagi’s kakuri-no-miya, the ‘hidden palace’ where the creator god retreated after his work was done. Said to be the oldest shrine mentioned in either the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki.

A note on the doors. Not everyone agrees the first land was Eshima. The small island of Nushima — reachable by a ten-minute ferry from Habu Port on Awaji’s southern coast — has a rival claim that runs deep in the older texts. Heian and Kamakura sources name Nushima as Onogoro, and a basalt pillar rising some thirty metres from its eastern shore, the Kamitategami-iwa, is widely identified with Ame-no-Mihashira — the divine pillar around which Izanagi and Izanami walked in opposite directions before they married. Scholars are still divided. The question for the traveller is which version of the creation you want to stand inside.

How to read the region

Awaji is the volume to read first, even though many travellers will arrive in Japan via Tokyo or Osaka and never set foot on it. Reading the Awaji material before any other volume — even before Izumo — gives you the cosmological floor on which every later myth stands. Without Onogoro, there are no islands. Without the islands, there is no Izumo for Susanoo to be banished to, no Takachiho for Ninigi to descend upon, no Ise for the sun goddess to rest, no Asuka for the first emperor to be crowned.

Stand at the harbour at Iwaya at sunset, look across at Eshima and out at the same Inland Sea the gods once looked down on, and feel how a creation myth can be both a story and a piece of geography. Few places in the world let you do both at once.