Reading Diary A: Japanese Mythology

For Week 6, I've chosen to do the unit on Japanese Mythology. I went to Japan my freshman year of high school and had a blast, but we didn't learn too much in terms of mythology or ancient tales! So when I saw the chance to read more in-depth on Japanese culture, of course I jumped at it. Here are my thoughts on a few of the stories from the first half of the unit.

When I was doing brainstorming for the storybook project, I read the Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi. This story originally intrigued me because of the way the gods are depicted. Rather than being omnipotent beings, they are depicted as very human-like and having many problems similar to what mortal people experience. One of the only differences that I could tell from gods and humans was the size of the gods. They are massive beings, with the serpent in this particular story being described as 

having a tail that drags "over eight valleys and as many mountains.” Perhaps because their gods were so much like the Japanese people is why they related to them so much. Who knows! 

Also, that paragraph above this one and I couldn't get it to format right, so that's kind of unfortunate. 

:(

Izanagi and Izanami from what I could tell was Japan's creation story (as every culture has). Izanagi is the God of the Heavens, and his wife, Izanami, is the Goddess of Love. Together they created the earth, moon and sun, along with every living creature that inhabits the world. In this story, the islands of Japan are children of the couple as well. But of course, no creation is complete without some sort of conflict. One of their daughters, Amaterasu, was put in charge of the High Plain of Heaven (which she accepted quite eagerly). One of their sons, Susa-no-wo was put in charge of the Moon and the seas (he wasn't too happy about this at all). 

Izanagi (link includes many other important gods and goddesses)

Eventually, the gods get upset with Izanami because they felt she treated the mortal humans as equal to the gods. They tried to banish her to a life of mortality, so she fled to a mountain and gave birth to the Fire God, Kagu-tsuchi. Knowing he was evil, she then birthed the God of Water to calm Kagu-tsuchi's fire whenever he got too angry. Then she died. Izanagi tried to revive her, but he was unable to. Thus he lived the rest of his life in despair.