Tsukuyomi

Also Known As: Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto; also Tsukiyomi, and Tsukuyumi “moon bow” in one Nihon Shoki variant; from Old Japanese tsuku, “moon”, and yomi, “reading” or “counting”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He governs the moon and the night, and his name marks him as the counter of months in a calendar that farming depends on.
Role in Mythos: He is the second of the three noble children born from Izanagi’s purification, and his killing of the food goddess is the reason the sun and the moon keep to separate halves of the day.
Relation to Humans: The grain, livestock and silkworms that feed Japan come from the body of the goddess he cut down, so his one recorded act underwrites the harvest he never meant to create. He is worshipped at auxiliary shrines of both the Inner and Outer Shrines at Ise, at a shrine in the Kadono district founded on an oracle, and at the summit of Gassan in Yamagata.

A hundred low tables stood ready on the reed plain, and every one of them was loaded. Boiled rice, still steaming. Fish with broad fins and fish with narrow fins. Game with rough hair and game with soft. The goddess who had produced all of it waited to be thanked. Instead her guest went rigid with rage, because he had watched her make it, and everything on those tables had come out of her mouth.

The guest was the moon.

Tsukuyomi arrives in the world in the middle of the most famous wash in Japanese literature. Izanagi, having fled the rotting underworld and the wife he found there, goes down to the plain of Ahagi at Tachibana in Hyūga to scrub the pollution off himself. He washes his left eye and the sun goddess is there. He washes his right eye and the moon is there. He washes his nose and the storm comes out. Three children in three motions, with the seawater still running off him.

The Nihon Shoki, never satisfied with one telling, offers others. In one, Izanagi takes a white-copper mirror in his left hand and the sun forms in it, then takes a mirror in his right hand and the moon forms in that, the pair of them bright and clean by nature and fit to be sent up to shine on heaven and earth. In another the moon god is simply born to Izanagi and Izanami in the ordinary way, a child whose radiance was second only to the sun’s, and dispatched skyward to help her govern. The variants disagree about the manner and agree about the ranking. He is always second, and always second to her.

What he was given to rule cannot be settled either. The Kojiki hands him the Dominion of the Night. The Nihon Shoki, in one place, tells him to take charge of the eight hundred fold tides of the ocean plain, which is a job description for a tide-puller rather than a lamp. In another it tells him only to be associated with his sister in the charge of heavenly matters. Read the accounts side by side and something looks displaced, as though the storm god had been pushed into a scheme originally built for two.

Then comes the visit. Amaterasu, established in heaven, heard that there was a deity called Uke Mochi down in the Central Land of Reed Plains, and sent her brother to attend on her. Uke Mochi turned her head toward the land and boiled rice came from her mouth. She turned to the sea and fish came. She turned to the mountains and game came. All of it went onto the hundred tables. Tsukuyomi flushed and said the two words the chronicle preserves: filthy, nasty. He drew his sword and killed her where she stood, then went back up to report what he had done, apparently expecting approval.

He kills her over table manners.

Amaterasu’s answer was short. You are a wicked deity, and I must not see you face to face. So the two of them were separated by one day and one night and have lived apart since, which is why sun and moon never hold the sky on the same terms. Nothing in either chronicle suggests the breach was ever repaired.

The aftermath is stranger than the murder. A second messenger went down and found the goddess dead but not finished. An ox and a horse had risen on the crown of her head. Millet grew on her forehead. Silkworms had appeared over her eyebrows, panic in her eyes, rice in her belly, wheat and beans below. The messenger gathered all of it and carried it up, and the sun goddess separated the dry-field seed from the wet-field seed and sowed the first rice in the narrow fields and the long fields of heaven. That autumn the ears hung down eight spans long. Japanese agriculture begins with a corpse, and the moon put it there.

The Kojiki tells nearly the same story with the killer swapped. There the food goddess is Ōgetsu-hime and the sword belongs to Susanoo, and the same crops rise from the same body. One myth, two owners. Which of them held it first is not something the texts will say.

Ask what he looked like and the record goes quiet. He has no face, no height, no colour, no attribute beyond the blade he draws, and the Man’yōshū’s Tsukuyomi Otoko, the moon-reading man, fixes his sex and nothing else. The shrines that hold him mark the moon rather than a body. It is a peculiar kind of divine presence: enormous, visible on any clear night, and entirely without a portrait.

The name is the best clue to what he was for. Tsuku is the moon; yomi is reading, or counting. Koyomi, the old word for a calendar, is built the same way out of counting days. A farmer standing knee-deep in a flooded paddy in the ninth month, with the cold coming up through the water, can read the date off the sky without owning a single written thing. That is the god at work, and it is why a deity named moon-counting belongs to the reckoning that agriculture runs on. The lunar month came before the solar year almost everywhere. The Nihon Shoki also preserves the spelling Tsukuyumi, moon bow, which is more likely a slip of pronunciation than a weapon. In the Man’yōshū he keeps the ochimizu, the water of rejuvenation, which fits the same old bargain between the moon and renewal: the thing that dies and returns every month.

He was not forgotten merely because he was quiet. In the reign of Kenzō an envoy bound for the peninsula was seized by the moon god, who announced through him that he was a descendant of Takamimusubi and that whoever worshipped him would be given joy. Land in the Kadono district of Yamashiro was set aside and a lineage from Iki appointed to conduct the rites. Both the Inner and Outer Shrines at Ise maintain a Tsukiyomi-no-miya for him. In Yamagata the 1,984-metre peak of the Dewa range is called Gassan, moon mountain, after the shrine on its summit, where pilgrims still climb through cloud over wet stone to reach him.

His power is the least dramatic and the most dependable in the pantheon. He is the light people work by and the count they work to, the pull under the tide, the fixed thing a year can be set against. Nothing in the texts gives him a battle, a weapon beyond the sword, or a monster to put down.

His limits follow from the same shape. He appears in one episode, does one terrible thing in it, and then goes silent for the rest of the record. His sister has a cave and a mirror and a dynasty. His brother has a serpent and an exile. He has a single visit and a permanent estrangement, and being right about the offence bought him nothing at all. Of the three noble children he is the only one without a cycle of his own, and the silence starts the moment his sister turns her face away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tsukuyomi in Japanese mythology?

Tsukuyomi is the moon god of Japanese mythology and Shinto, born from the right eye of Izanagi during the purification that followed his escape from the underworld. He is the second of the three noble children, ranked between his sister Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and his brother Susanoo. His name combines the Old Japanese words for moon and for reading or counting.

Why did Tsukuyomi kill Uke Mochi?

Amaterasu sent Tsukuyomi to attend the food goddess Uke Mochi, who produced a banquet by turning toward the land, the sea and the mountains and disgorging rice, fish and game from her mouth. Tsukuyomi found this filthy and drew his sword on her. From her body afterwards came the ox, the horse, the silkworm and the grains that became Japan’s staple crops.

Why are the sun and moon never in the sky together?

When Tsukuyomi reported the killing, Amaterasu called him a wicked deity and refused to look at him again. The two were separated by one day and one night and have kept apart ever since, which is the Nihon Shoki’s explanation for why day and night do not share the sky.

What does the name Tsukuyomi mean?

Tsukuyomi is built from tsuku, the Old Japanese word for moon or month, and yomi, meaning reading or counting, so the name amounts to moon-counting. The same construction lies behind koyomi, the old word for a calendar, and it ties the god to the lunar reckoning that agriculture depended on. The Nihon Shoki also records the spelling Tsukuyumi, moon bow, which is generally taken as a pronunciation variant.

Where is Tsukuyomi worshipped?

Tsukuyomi is enshrined at Tsukiyomi-no-miya, auxiliary shrines of both the Inner and Outer Shrines at Ise, and at Tsukiyomi Shrine in Kyoto, an auxiliary shrine of Matsunoo Taisha. He is also the deity of Gassan Shrine on the summit of Mount Gassan in Yamagata, one of the Three Mountains of Dewa, whose name means moon mountain.