Kuninotokotachi

Japan has two eighth-century accounts of its own creation and they do not start in the same place. The Kojiki opens in heaven with an abstraction; the Nihon Shoki opens with the land standing. Both records are in this batch and neither is presented as the true one — which matters more here than in most traditions, because the divergence was a live political question for a thousand years and Kuninotokotachi was pushed to the top of the pantheon by medieval Shinto theologians precisely because his name says 'land'.

Domains

• creation
• earth

Sources

• Kuninotokotachi is the first kami of the Nihon Shoki's main narrative, where the Kojiki instead begins with Ame-no-Minakanushi, and stands at the head of the seven generations of the age of the gods.: Reference treatments of Kuninotokotachi and of the Kojiki-Nihon Shoki divergence over the first kami. (secondary)