Yomi

Also Known As: 黄泉; also Yomi-no-kuni and Yomo-tsu-kuni, “the land of Yomi”; the characters are borrowed from Chinese huangquan, “yellow springs”, and gloss the native Japanese word rather than translate it
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: Yomi holds the dead, binds anyone who eats food cooked at its hearths, and is the place from which the fixed daily quota of human deaths is issued.
Role in Mythos: It is the country Izanagi enters to fetch his dead wife back and flees from empty-handed, and the sealing of its slope establishes death as permanent.
Relation to Humans: Every person goes there when they die, noble or mean, virtuous or wicked, and nothing in the *Kojiki* suggests reward or punishment waits on the far side. The living reach it by one slope in Izumo, which was blocked with a boulder, and the only recorded remedy for having been near it is to wash.

A god broke the end tooth off the comb in his hair and set it alight, and by that one small flame he saw what the dark had been keeping from him. His wife had told him not to look. She had gone back behind the door of the hall to put his request to the deities of the place, and she had been a long time about it, and he could not wait. So he lit the tooth. Maggots were swarming. The body was rotting, and thunder had taken up residence in it: in the head, in the breast, in both hands, in both feet, eight thunder deities born out of the decay and settled there like tenants.

That is the whole of what the oldest account gives of the interior of Yomi. One door, one hall, one light, and a sight the god who saw it spent the rest of the episode running from.

Yomi is the land of the dead in the *Kojiki*, the Japanese chronicle completed in 712, and it is the strangest kind of otherworld: enormously consequential and almost entirely undescribed. Izanami had died of the burns she took giving birth to the fire deity, and was buried on Mount Hiba. Her husband Izanagi went after her, because the lands the two of them had been making were not finished. She came out from the palace, raised the door, and met him on the threshold, and what she said to him was the sentence that closes the story before it starts. He had come too late. She had already eaten from the furnace of Yomi. Food cooked in that country belongs to that country, and so afterwards does whoever eats it, and no amount of goodwill on either side undoes the arrangement.

She asked for time to negotiate, and asked him not to look, and he looked.

What follows is one of the great chases in world myth, and it is conducted almost entirely with small household objects. Izanami, shamed, sends the Yomotsu-shikome after him. He throws down his black headdress and it becomes grapes, and while she stops to gather and eat them he gains ground. He breaks the comb out of his right hair-bunch and throws that down and it becomes bamboo shoots, and she stops for those too. Then the eight thunder deities come, with fifteen hundred warriors of Yomi behind them, and he runs with his ten-grasp sabre swinging behind his back. At the foot of the Even Pass of Yomi three peach trees are growing. He picks three peaches and throws them, and the entire army of the dead turns and flees. He then thanked the peaches formally, gave them a divine title, and charged them to go on helping the people of the middle land whenever they fell into trouble.

Izanami came last, herself. He rolled a rock across the pass, a rock it would take a thousand men to lift, and they stood on either side of it and divorced. She said she would strangle a thousand people a day in his country. He said he would raise fifteen hundred birthing huts a day, so a thousand would die and fifteen hundred be born, and the sum has been running ever since. She took the name Great Deity of Yomi. The rock took a name too, and is worshipped under it: the Great Deity Who Turns Back the Road.

The pass itself has an address. The *Kojiki* says plainly that what used to be called the Even Pass of Yomi is now called Ifuya-zaka in the land of Izumo, and a slope in the Iya district of Matsue is identified with it today. The nineteenth-century commentator Moribe guessed that Ifuya came from *yūyami*, evening darkness, an etymology that suits the story a little too neatly to trust.

Where Yomi actually sits is a live argument, and the answer most people repeat is younger than it sounds. That Yomi lies underground was established by Motoori Norinaga in the *Kojikiden* in the late eighteenth century, on two pieces of evidence: a ritual prayer that calls Izanami’s country a “lower” land against Izanagi’s “upper” one, and Susanoo’s phrase *ne no katasukuni*, which Motoori read as root-land, meaning below. Kōnoshi Takamitsu took both apart in the *Japanese Journal of Religious Studies* in 1984. Upper and lower in a prayer are relative positions, not elevations; the Land of the Sea is also called lower and is not underground. The Chinese characters mean yellow springs, but they were fitted to a Japanese word whose meaning nobody has recovered, and even the old derivations from *yoru*, night, and *yami*, darkness, fail on the linguistics. On Kōnoshi’s reading Yomi lies beyond the slope, on the same level as the middle land of reed plains, one of several countries ringing the inhabited world rather than a basement beneath it. The god lit a torch because the hall was dark, not because the country was.

There is an older, cooler explanation that will not go away: that the whole episode is a tomb. Tsugita Jun argued in 1924 that the door is the slab across the mouth of a burial chamber, the hall is the passage into it, the slope is the way out, and the thousand-man rock is the stone that seals the mound. It reads well against the horizontal stone chambers of the period, and later scholars have kept it as a partial explanation while conceding it cannot be the whole one.

As for how Yomi came to exist, nobody in the tradition knows. Izanagi and Izanami made the islands, the mountains, the rivers and the sea, and the chronicles record the making item by item, but no text says which deity made Yomi or when, and the Edo commentator Suzuki Shigetane concluded it could not have been created separately at all. It is simply there, older than the record, waiting.

What Yomi can do is narrow and absolute. It keeps what it takes. It sets the rate at which people die. It leaks: everything that comes out of it is bad news, and Kokugakuin University’s standard Shinto glossary describes Yomi flatly as the world where evil, unhappiness, destruction and curses originate, the counterweight to the bright plain of heaven. Its limits are just as specific. It can be outrun. It can be fooled with grapes and bamboo shoots. It can be driven back with fruit. It can be shut with a stone, and the stone holds. And its contamination washes off: Izanagi came out saying he had been in a hideous and polluted land, went down to a river mouth in Tsukushi, and bathed, and out of that washing came Amaterasu from his left eye, the moon god from his right, and Susanoo from his nose. The three most important deities in the pantheon are, in the most literal sense, what the god rinsed off after visiting the dead.

There is no gate, no judge, no ledger. Motoori’s own summary is still the most honest one: Yomi is where all men go when they die, noble or mean, virtuous or wicked, and that is all it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Yomi in Japanese mythology?

Yomi is the land of the dead in the *Kojiki*, the Japanese chronicle of 712. Everyone goes there at death regardless of conduct, and the text describes no judgement, reward or punishment. It is best known as the country Izanami was confined to after her death and the place her husband Izanagi failed to bring her back from.

Why couldn’t Izanami leave Yomi?

She had already eaten food cooked at the hearths of Yomi, which permanently binds the eater to that country. When Izanagi arrived and asked her to come home, she told him he had come too late and that she would have to put the request to the deities of Yomi. She never got the chance, because he broke his promise not to look at her.

Where is the entrance to Yomi?

The *Kojiki* states that the slope called Yomotsu Hirasaka, the Even Pass of Yomi, is the place later known as Ifuya-zaka in the province of Izumo, and a slope in the Iya district of Matsue in Shimane Prefecture is identified with it today. Izanagi sealed it behind him with a rock it would take a thousand men to lift, and that rock is itself venerated as a deity.

Is Yomi underground?

That is disputed. Motoori Norinaga established the underground reading in the late eighteenth century and it became standard, but the scholar Kōnoshi Takamitsu argued in 1984 that the *Kojiki* places Yomi beyond the slope and on the same level as the human world rather than beneath it. The Chinese characters used to write Yomi mean “yellow springs” and suggest a subterranean realm, but they were borrowed to gloss a Japanese word whose original meaning is unknown.

Who rules Yomi?

Izanami, after her death and the sealing of the pass, is called Yomotsu-Ōkami, the Great Deity of Yomi. The *Kojiki* also refers to unnamed “deities of Yomi” whom Izanami intended to consult about her release, but says almost nothing about who they are. Eight thunder deities born from her decaying body also dwell there.