Walk for forty-five minutes from Nushima’s small harbor along the island’s southern coastal path, and you will arrive at a viewpoint over the sea. Below you, rising thirty meters straight out of the water, is a single column of rock — narrow, pointed at the top, shaped almost like a great stone candle. It is called Kamitategami-iwa, “the upper standing-god rock.” And it is, by local tradition, the actual cosmic pillar around which Japan’s first marriage took place.
What happened here
In the Kojiki’s account of the kuni-umi, after Izanagi and Izanami descend onto Onogoro, they do something specific. They build a pillar. The text calls it the Ame-no-Mihashira — the heavenly pillar. They walk around it in opposite directions, Izanami going right and Izanagi going left. They meet on the far side. They speak the first words of the cosmic marriage.
This is the point at which Japan, properly speaking, begins. Not when the gods land on Onogoro — that is just geography. The marriage is what creates the rest. And the marriage requires the pillar, around which the walking takes place.
The Kojiki does not say the pillar still exists. But the local tradition on Nushima — and especially among the island’s older fishermen — has always identified Kamitategami-iwa as the pillar’s surviving form. Its shape, its solitude rising out of the sea, its scale relative to the surrounding cliffs: all of it suggests a column rather than a typical sea stack.
What you’ll actually see
The viewpoint is on a clifftop on Nushima’s southeastern coast. Below the cliff, the sea stack rises sharply, isolated from the shore by perhaps thirty meters of open water. Smaller stacks and arches surround it on either side, but Kamitategami-iwa is the largest and the most singular.
You cannot reach the rock itself. There is no boat service to it from Nushima, and no anchorage. What you can do is sit at the viewpoint, where a small wooden pavilion provides shade, and watch the pillar from above for as long as you like. On clear days, the rock is set against the deep blue of the Pacific. On cloudy days, it disappears entirely into mist.
Three things to look for
- The narrow profile — viewed from above, Kamitategami-iwa is clearly thinner at the top than at the base, a shape that local tradition treats as evidence of its divine origin (a natural sea stack might be expected to erode more uniformly).
- The companion stacks — to either side of the main rock are smaller stacks that, in some local tellings, represent the spear and the brine droplets from the kuni-umi narrative.
- The currents — the strait between Nushima and the rock formation runs strongly. This is the same body of water that, on the Kojiki’s account, Izanagi and Izanami stirred together.
How it fits the trail
Kamitategami-iwa is the conceptual climax of the Awaji circuit. Onokoro Jinja and Eshima identify where the first island stood. Nushima itself identifies the place where Izanagi and Izanami descended. But Kamitategami-iwa identifies the specific feature — the pillar — without which the marriage that created Japan could not have occurred.
If you have the time on Nushima for only one walk, make it this one. The path is straightforward; the round trip from the harbor is about an hour and a half; and what you will see at the end, framed by the cliffs and the sea, is the closest thing on the trail to a physical surviving fragment of the Kojiki’s first scene.
The pillar around which the gods walked. Still standing.