Ame-no-Uzume-no-Mikoto

The eight hundred myriad gods had run out of ideas. Their voices filled the dry bed of the Tranquil River of Heaven like flies swarming in the fifth month, and above them there was no light at all, because the sun had shut herself into a cave in the rock and made the door fast behind her. They set the long-singing birds of eternal night to crowing at nothing. They scorched a stag’s shoulder blade over cherry bark and read the cracks in it. They hammered a mirror out of heavenly iron, strung five hundred curved jewels on a cord, and pulled a whole sakaki tree up by the roots from Mount Kagu so the jewels could hang from its upper branches and the mirror from the middle ones. None of it moved her. What moved her was a woman climbing onto an upturned tub and starting to take her clothes off.

Ame-no-Uzume prepared like someone who intended to be looked at. She looped the heavenly clubmoss of Mount Kagu over her shoulders and back to her wrists as a sash, the kind worn to brace the hands for heavy work. She made herself a headdress of spindle-tree leaves. She bound bamboo grass into a posy for each fist. Then she set a hollow wooden sounding board face down before the cave door and stamped on it until it resounded, and the noise went up through the soles of her feet and out across the plain.

The Kojiki says she behaved as though possessed by a deity, and the careful hedge inside that phrase has kept commentators arguing ever since; the Nihon Shoki, telling the same scene, reads as if the possession were real. Either way she pulled out the nipples of her breasts and pushed her skirt string down past her navel, and the Plain of High Heaven shook, and eight hundred myriad gods laughed at once.

The door opened a crack. From inside, the sun asked how it could be that with her gone into hiding, and heaven dark, and the reed plains dark, the Alarming Female was making merry and the whole assembly was laughing. Uzume answered without a pause. There is a deity here more illustrious than you. While she was still speaking, Ame-no-Koyane and Futodama tilted the mirror forward, and Amaterasu, who had never once seen her own face, leaned further out to look at it.

What happened next was not her doing. Ame-no-Tajikarao, waiting flat against the rock beside the door, caught the sun by the hand and hauled her clear, and Futodama drew a straw rope across the mouth of the cave behind her and told her she was not to go back past it. Light returned to the high plain and to the reed plains below. The plan had been Omoikane’s, the mirror was Ishikoridome’s work, and the hand on Amaterasu’s wrist belonged to somebody else. What Uzume supplied was the laughter, which is to say the only element of the whole operation that could not be manufactured in advance.

No text says where she came from. She has no birth in the chronicles, no parents named, no earlier appearance anywhere; she is simply present in the crowd at the riverbed at the moment the crowd needs her. Even her name will not settle. Chamberlain gave Uzume as “alarming”, following commentators who took it for the brazenness that lets a person stare another out of countenance. Moribe read it instead as head-dress, after the spindle-tree leaves. Both are guesses at a word the eighth century had already stopped explaining.

The chronicles describe her equipment rather than her body. Vine at the shoulders, leaves in the hair, grass in the fists, a plank underfoot, and the only flesh either text troubles to mention is the flesh she deliberately uncovered. That is the entire portrait. It reads like a description of a performer in costume, which may be precisely what the compilers had in front of them, since the priestesses who claimed her as ancestress were still dancing when the texts were written down.

Her second great scene comes at the eight-forking road of heaven, where Ninigi was about to descend and found the way held. A deity stood there whose brightness reached up to the high plain and down to the reed plains at once, with a nose seven hand-spans long and eyes like two eight-span mirrors glowing the red of a ripe ground cherry. Nobody volunteered to ask him his business. Amaterasu sent Uzume, and the reason she gave is one of the better compliments in the corpus: you are a delicate female, but you are a deity who wins by facing deities. Uzume walked up to him, bared her breast, pushed the band of her garment below her navel, and laughed in his face until he explained himself. His name was Sarutahiko, and he had come to offer himself as vanguard and guide.

For that, Ninigi gave her his name. She became Sarume no Kimi, and her descendants held the office of shrine dancers, women who performed at court and were understood to be doing again what she had done first. She and Sarutahiko later married. There is one further story about her and it is not a kind one. Going among the fishes of the sea to ask whether they would serve the heavenly grandchild, she found every creature answered yes except the sea cucumber, which said nothing at all, so she took her small knife and cut it a mouth. Sea cucumbers have carried that slit ever since, and they still do not speak.

Her powers are really one power worn several ways. She can enter, or convincingly counterfeit, the state the sources call divine possession, and the performance is strong enough to shake heaven. She can take an audience and hold it. She can walk up to something vast and luminous that has frightened off an entire pantheon and treat it as a joke, which turns out to be the correct diplomatic technique. The dance she improvised on that overturned tub is reckoned the origin of kagura, and the ecstatic, shamanic shape of possession dance in Japanese ritual is traced back through her.

The limits are just as visible. Nothing she does works alone. Remove the eight hundred gods and the tub is only a tub, because her whole art depends on other people being there to laugh and on somebody competent standing ready by the door. She never rules anything and is never asked to. She is dispatched, and afterwards she is renamed for the being she was sent to confront, so that the title her priestesses carried for centuries commemorates an encounter rather than a person. The English habit of calling her a goddess of the dawn is also newer than it sounds; it rests largely on Michael Witzel’s 2005 comparison of the rock cave to the Vedic Vala myth, which lines Uzume up with Ushas. It is a serious argument and worth reading. It is not what the Kojiki says. What the Kojiki says is that the world went dark, and a woman made a rude joke, and that this was enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ame-no-Uzume?

Ame-no-Uzume is the Japanese goddess of ritual dance and mirth, recorded in the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720. She is best known for the performance that drew the sun goddess Amaterasu out of the Heavenly Rock Cave. She is also the ancestress claimed by the Sarume no Kimi, the priestly house whose women served as shrine dancers.

What did Ame-no-Uzume do to bring Amaterasu out of the cave?

She turned a wooden tub upside down before the cave door, stamped on it until it resounded, and danced as though possessed, exposing her breasts and pushing her skirt string down below her navel. Eight hundred myriad gods laughed so hard that the Plain of High Heaven shook. Amaterasu opened the door to ask what the noise was, and Ame-no-Koyane and Futodama used that moment to show her the mirror.

Is Ame-no-Uzume a goddess of the dawn?

Not in the Japanese sources. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki present her as a goddess of dance, possession and mirth, and never call her a dawn deity. The dawn description comes mainly from Michael Witzel’s 2005 comparison of the Heavenly Rock Cave myth with the Vedic Vala myth, which aligns her with the Indo-European dawn goddess Ushas.

Who was Ame-no-Uzume married to?

She married Sarutahiko, the earthly deity she confronted at the eight-forking road of heaven when he blocked Ninigi’s descent. Ninigi afterwards conferred Sarutahiko’s name on her, and she became known as Sarume no Kimi. Together they are treated as the founding pair of the Sarume line.

Why is Ame-no-Uzume connected to kagura?

Her dance on the overturned tub is traditionally counted as the first kagura, the sacred dance performed at Shinto shrines. Because that dance was an act of divine possession meant to draw out another deity, kagura carries the same purpose: performance as communication with the kami. The shamanic choreography preserved in traditions such as Hayachine kagura is traced back to her.

Related Entries

Amaterasu, Susanoo, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, Izanagi and Izanami, Yamata no Orochi, Uke Mochi, Oyamatsumi, Kami, Inari, Sarugami, Yatagarasu, Tengu