Takamagahara

Also Known As: 高天原, “Plain of High Heaven”; also read Takama-no-hara, Takamanohara, Takaamahara and Takaamanohara
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The dwelling place of the amatsukami, the heavenly kami, and the top tier of a three-level cosmos stacked above the human world and the land of the dead.
Role in Mythos: It is where the first deities come into being, where Amaterasu is given rule, and the place every imperial claim descends from.
Relation to Humans: No mortal ever climbs to it and the texts never suggest one could, so the traffic runs entirely downward. What it sends down is the line of Ninigi and the three regalia, which is to say the legitimacy of the throne rather than any promise of an afterlife.

The looms never stopped. In a hall set apart from the other buildings, women drew shuttles back and forth through warp threads of cloth meant for gods, and the clack of it carried out over flooded rice paddies, along irrigation ditches cut straight and clean, up toward a mountain where deer grazed and a wide riverbed of pale stones lay dry in the sun. This was the Plain of High Heaven. For the place that held the entire divine order of Japan, it looked a great deal like a well-run farming province.

That is the strangest thing about Takamagahara, and the easiest to walk past. The Kojiki, set down in 712, gives it no throne room and no palace of light. It gives it fields, ditches, a weaving shed, a smith, a metal mountain, and a riverbed wide enough for eight hundred myriad deities to hold a meeting in. The gods there grow rice. They forge iron. They argue about property lines.

Nobody made it. The record opens with the names of the deities who came into being in the Plain of High Heaven when heaven and earth began: Ame-no-Minakanushi, master of the august centre of heaven, then Takamimusubi and Kamimusubi, the two producing powers. All three were born alone and hid their persons, which is the text’s way of saying they arrived without parents and then withdrew. The plain is simply there first, the ground on which becoming happens. No origin is offered for it at all, and the silence is worth noticing, because this is a tradition that will shortly explain the birth of every island and very nearly every rock.

Its position is precise even when its nature is not. Below it lies Ashihara no Nakatsukuni, the Central Land of Reed Plains, which is Japan. Below that lie Yomi and Ne-no-kuni, the land of the dead and the land of roots. The three sit stacked, and the Floating Bridge of Heaven spans the gap at the top.

Rule of the plain was a gift, and an impulsive one. Izanagi, washing the filth of the underworld off himself at a river mouth in Himuka, cleaned his left eye and Amaterasu was born out of it. He rejoiced, shook the jewelled string from around his neck until the beads rang, and handed it to her with the charge to rule the Plain of High Heaven. Tsukuyomi was given the dominion of night. Susanoo was given the sea.

Susanoo did not want the sea. Expelled by his father for weeping after his dead mother, he announced that he would go up and take leave of his sister first, and every mountain and river shook as he climbed. Amaterasu heard the noise and did not believe a word of it. She unbound her hair and twisted it into male bunches, wound five hundred curved jewels through them, slung on a quiver of a thousand arrows and a second of five hundred, brandished her bow until its top shuddered, and stamped her legs into the hard ground up to the thighs, kicking the earth away like rotten snow. Then she asked him what he was doing there. They swore an oath from opposite banks of the Tranquil River of Heaven, which the commentators take for the Milky Way, crunching each other’s swords and jewels between their teeth and breathing out children in the mist.

He won the exchange, or said he had, and the win made him unbearable. He broke down the divisions between her rice fields and filled in the ditches. He fouled the hall where she tasted the first new rice of the season. She covered for him out loud, saying the mess must be vomit and that her brother must simply resent good land going to waste under embankments. Then, while she sat in the sacred weaving hall overseeing the making of the gods’ garments, he tore a hole in the roof ridge and dropped a heavenly piebald colt through it, flayed backward from the tail. One of the weaving women was so startled that she struck herself with her shuttle and died.

Amaterasu went into the rock cave and pulled the door shut behind her. The Plain of High Heaven went dark, the land below it went dark, and a night settled in that showed no sign of ending. The voices of the deities rose everywhere like flies swarming in the fifth month, and every variety of calamity came out at once. So the eight hundred myriad gods went down into the dry bed of the Tranquil River and held council, and Omoikane, who could hold the thoughts of many inside one mind, worked out the plan. They gathered the long-crowing birds of endless night and made them sing. They took hard stones from the riverbed and iron from the heavenly metal mountains, called in the smith Ama-tsu-mara, set Ishikoridome to make a mirror and Tamanoya to string five hundred curved jewels. They pulled a stag’s shoulder blade and cherry bark off Ame-no-Kaguyama and burned them for divination. They uprooted a sakaki from the same mountain and hung the jewels on its upper branches, the mirror among the middle ones, white and blue offerings below. Then Ame-no-Uzume turned a tub upside down before the cave door, bound club moss over her shoulders and bamboo grass into her hands, and danced on it until it boomed, opening her dress as she went. The eight hundred myriad deities laughed so hard that the plain shook, and the curiosity of the sun did the rest.

What the place is actually for only becomes clear at the close of the divine age. Amaterasu and Takamimusubi send Ninigi down from Takamagahara to rule the reed plains, and they send with him the mirror that lured her out, the long string of curved jewels, and the sword taken from the serpent’s tail. Regard this mirror exactly as if it were our spirit, they tell him, and reverence it as you would reverence us. Every sovereign after him traces the claim through that descent. The plain is not a paradise, not a reward, not anywhere the dead are going. It is the address a bloodline comes from.

Its dangers run in one direction only. Nothing mortal climbs up, and the texts never entertain the possibility; the movement is always downward, gods descending to pacify a country that is not theirs yet. What the plain cannot manage is the defence of its own light. One furious brother put it out, and heaven had to be talked back open with a mirror, an indecent dance and eight hundred myriad gods laughing on cue.

Where it was has been argued over for centuries. Motoori Norinaga held that a place where gods live is in the sky and that looking for it anywhere else is impudence, a position that hardened into state doctrine before the Second World War. Arai Hakuseki went the other way, wrote that the gods were men, and located Takamagahara in the Taga district of Hitachi. Others point to Takama in Gose, in the old Katsuragi country of Nara, where Takamahiko Shrine still stands with Takamimusubi enshrined in it and a peak behind the main hall as its object of worship, or to Takachiho in Miyazaki, which has its own rock cave and its own night-long Kagura. Yamagata Bantō cut the question off from the other side entirely: the age of the gods was made up by later generations, so asking for its coordinates is a waste of breath. The standard Shinto reference published by Kokugakuin University is blunt about it, noting the attempts to read the descent as a memory of migrating peoples and concluding that the phrase most likely meant a higher world in the religious sense from the beginning.

Even the name refuses to settle. The Kojiki’s opening carries an instruction to read the character for heaven as ama, and the older commentators accordingly say Takama-no-hara; the possessive form everyone now uses, Takamagahara, is the later arrival. And the Nihon Shoki, finished only eight years after the Kojiki, is oddly cool toward the word. Its main narrative largely does without it, and the Plain of High Heaven surfaces chiefly in the variant accounts appended to the text, in one of which Izanagi and Izanami sit on the plain and scrape the first island together out of the brine with a jewelled spear. The most famous address in Japanese myth belongs, in the main, to a single book.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Takamagahara?

Takamagahara is the Plain of High Heaven, the dwelling place of the amatsukami or heavenly kami in Japanese mythology. It appears at the very opening of the Kojiki as the place where the first three deities came into being when heaven and earth began. It sits at the top of a three-tiered cosmos, above the Central Land of Reed Plains and above Yomi, the land of the dead.

Who rules Takamagahara?

Amaterasu, the sun goddess, rules Takamagahara. Izanagi gave her the plain after she was born from his left eye during his purification, shaking off his jewelled necklace and handing it to her with the charge. Her brothers were given the other two domains, Tsukuyomi the realm of night and Susanoo the sea.

Where is Takamagahara located?

The texts place it in the sky, connected to earth by the Floating Bridge of Heaven, and Japanese scholarship has argued about whether to read that literally for several hundred years. Motoori Norinaga insisted it was heaven and nowhere else; Arai Hakuseki placed it in Hitachi; local traditions claim Takama in Gose, Nara, and Takachiho in Miyazaki. Kokugakuin University’s standard Shinto reference concludes that the phrase most likely meant a higher world in the religious sense from the start.

What happened when Amaterasu hid in the cave?

Susanoo flayed a piebald colt backward and threw it through the roof of the heavenly weaving hall, killing one of the weaving women, and Amaterasu shut herself behind the rock door. Both Takamagahara and the land below it went dark, and endless night set in until the eight hundred myriad deities held council in the dry bed of the Tranquil River of Heaven. They made a mirror and a string of curved jewels, hung them on an uprooted sakaki, and had Ame-no-Uzume dance on an overturned tub until the gods laughed loudly enough to draw Amaterasu out.

Can humans reach Takamagahara?

No. No mortal reaches Takamagahara in the classical texts and the tradition never proposes a route, which sets it apart from the underworld, where Izanagi went and returned. The traffic runs downward instead, most consequentially when Ninigi descends from the plain carrying the mirror, the jewels and the sword that become the imperial regalia.