The Kojiki, Japan’s oldest surviving text, begins with a problem: the world is unfinished. The land below is “still young and floating like oil,” drifting on the surface of an unformed sea. Above it stretches the High Plain of Heaven, where the gods stand in council, looking down. They have decided that the drifting world needs an anchor. They have decided to make islands.
What follows is one of the strangest, oldest creation stories in East Asia. It involves a spear, a pillar, a ritual mistake, an abandoned child, and a marriage performed twice. By the end of it, the islands of Japan exist. The first of them is Awaji.
This is how it happens.
The floating bridge
Two gods are chosen for the work: Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, brother and sister, husband and wife. They are not the first gods — seven generations of kami have already come and gone in the Plain of High Heaven — but they are the first to be tasked with making something. The earlier deities recede into abstraction. Izanagi and Izanami step forward.
The heavenly council gives them a tool: Ame-no-Nuboko, the Heavenly Jeweled Spear. Some translations call it a “halberd”; others, a “lance.” The original word suggests a long shaft tipped with something precious. They are also given an instruction, recorded only obliquely: complete this drifting world. Make it solid. Make it land.
They walk together to the edge of heaven and step onto Ame-no-Ukihashi, the floating bridge between the worlds. From here, they can look down at the formless sea below. From here, they can begin.
The first drop
Izanagi and Izanami lower the spear from the bridge. They thrust it into the brine of the world-sea. They stir.
The Kojiki describes the sound: koworo-koworo — a low, glutinous churning. The sea thickens beneath the spear’s tip. They stir longer. The brine begins to congeal. When at last they raise the spear, droplets fall from its blade and slip down its length, returning to the surface of the sea below.
The first drop does not dissolve. It cools. It hardens. It becomes an island — small, irregular, formed by accident from the residue of the act that made it. The gods name this first island Onogoro-shima, “the self-curdled isle.” It is the first piece of land in the world.
The Kojiki does not record where Onogoro lies. Later scholars and Edo-period commentators would argue about which real-world islet it corresponded to. Two strong candidates emerged, both off the coast of Awaji: Eshima, a small tilted islet at Iwaya on Awaji’s northern coast, and Nushima, a larger island off Awaji’s southern shore. Both still exist. Both are visitable. The text itself does not choose between them.
The pillar and the walk
Izanagi and Izanami descend from heaven onto Onogoro. This is the first earthly place. It is, for them, the first time their feet touch land that exists rather than drifts.
On the island they build Ame-no-Mihashira, the Heavenly Pillar. The pillar is a ritual object — a vertical axis connecting heaven and earth, marking the centre of the new world. The text gives no description of its size or material. It exists, and it is sacred. (The basalt sea-stack at the eastern shore of Nushima, a thirty-metre column of dark rock rising straight from the water, is widely identified with this pillar in later tradition. Walk to the southern end of the island and you can stand on the cliff above it.)
The two gods agree on a marriage rite. Izanami will walk around the pillar from one direction; Izanagi from the other. When they meet on the far side, they will speak words of greeting and become husband and wife.
They walk. They meet. Izanami speaks first: Ana-ni-ya-shi, e-otoko-wo — “Oh, what a fine young man.” Izanagi replies: Ana-ni-ya-shi, e-otome-wo — “Oh, what a fine young woman.” They consummate the marriage. Izanami conceives.
The first child fails
The child born of this first union is Hiruko — the Leech Child. The text gives little detail. Hiruko cannot stand on its legs by the age when other children walk. The parents take it as a sign that something has gone wrong. They place it in a reed boat and let it drift away.
They return to heaven and consult the gods. The heavenly council determines, through divination, the source of the error: in the marriage rite, the woman spoke first. The ritual is corrected. Izanagi and Izanami are instructed to perform the walk again, and this time Izanagi must speak first.
The scene is uncomfortable for modern readers. The text is not trying to comfort anyone. It is recording, as carefully as its compilers could, what they understood about how the world was made and the consequences of ritual error. The Hiruko episode is the first instance in Japanese myth of a thing made wrongly and a thing made again — a pattern that will recur throughout the rest of the Kojiki, and through the structure of Japanese religious practice for the next thousand years.
The birth of Awaji
The gods return to Onogoro. They walk around the pillar again. This time Izanagi speaks first. The marriage takes. Izanami conceives a second time.
The child she bears is not a child but an island. Awaji-no-ho-no-sa-wake-no-shima — “Awaji, the island of foam-spray separations.” It is the first true land of Japan, the first piece of geography born rather than dropped.
After Awaji, the births continue. Izanami bears Shikoku (called in the text Iyo-no-futana-shima, the twin-named island of Iyo). Then Oki. Then Tsukushi, the old name for Kyushu. Then Iki. Then Tsushima. Then Sado. Then Oho-yamato-toyo-aki-zu-shima — the great island of Honshu. Eight islands in total. The Kojiki calls them, collectively, Oh-yashima, “the Eight Great Islands.” This is Japan.
The text continues. After the islands, Izanami bears the gods of sea and river, of mountain and field, of wind and tree. The pantheon is born. The work the heavenly council began is being completed.
The work will end badly. Izanami will die giving birth to the god of fire and will descend to Yomi-no-kuni, the underworld. Izanagi will follow her, see what he should not have seen, and flee. From his ritual cleansing afterward, the sun goddess Amaterasu will be born. From her, the imperial line will descend. The whole rest of the Kojiki — the Izumo cycle, the descent at Takachiho, the unification of Yamato — flows from what begins on Onogoro.
But the islands come first. And Awaji comes first of the islands.
Why Awaji
The geographic detail is striking. The Kojiki’s compilers, working in the eighth century at the Yamato court near present-day Nara, could have chosen any island as the first. They chose Awaji.
Awaji sits in the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku — a sixty-kilometre island visible from both. From the Yamato heartland, it is the closest large island, the one that mediates the strait between Honshu and Shikoku, the one through which the early sea routes passed. It is, in a literal sense, a doorway: a piece of land where two larger lands face each other across narrow water. Calling it the first-born is not arbitrary. It is geography reading itself as theology.
There is more. The northern coast of Awaji, where Eshima rises from the harbour at Iwaya, looks across the Akashi Strait directly at the mountains of Kobe. The southern coast, where Fukura Port faces Nushima, looks across the Naruto Strait directly at Shikoku. Standing at either shore, you can see how the islands of Japan come together. The Kuni-umi myth places the act of creation precisely at the seam.
What to do with this
For a traveller, the Kuni-umi myth is not abstract. The places named in it still exist, and they are reachable. Onogoro — whichever candidate you believe — is a real islet you can walk to or sail to in an hour. The Heavenly Pillar is a real basalt column on the eastern shore of Nushima. The shrines that grew up around the myth — Onokoro Jinja near Awaji’s central rice plains, Izanagi Jingu in the island’s middle — are still working religious sites where the original gods are still enshrined.
This is unusual. Most of the world’s foundational myths describe places that no longer exist, or that never did. The Kojiki describes places you can stand in. The reed boat into which Hiruko was placed presumably did not survive; the pillar around which Izanagi and Izanami walked, by tradition, can be seen from a clifftop on Nushima this afternoon.
To walk the Kuni-umi sites is to do something the text quietly invites: to stand inside the creation story, to look at the sea the gods stirred, to face the islet they made. It is also to test the text against the geography — to ask whether Eshima or Nushima feels more like a first land, whether Onokoro Jinja or Izanagi Jingu carries the deeper presence. The Kojiki does not answer these questions for the reader. It leaves them for the standing in.
This is the volume to read first. Before Izumo, before Takachiho, before any later cycle. Without Onogoro, no islands. Without the islands, no Japan.
Begin here.