It’s not well known that Japan is the oldest country among the world that retains a same emperor line until now.

Emperor in Japan is called Ten-noh （天皇）.

Ten-noh family is said that it’s started from ancient times.

Not only that, Japanese myth says their ancestor is god.

The gods of “Kuni-umi 国産み (give birth to Japan)” are root of Ten-noh family.

In this article, I try to explain story of Kuni-umi gods.

The birth of Kuni-umi gods “Izanagi 伊邪那岐” and “Izanami伊邪那美”

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Although there are a lot of ancient stories in the world, their common point is “God creates everything.”

In Japanese myth, that is common.

First, the source god appeared in the space.

And then, pairs of god who has sex was born one after another.

One of them was “Izanagi and Izanami”, the god of Kuni-umi.

(Izanagi was a male god, Izanami was a female god.)

Their role was to create Japanese land.

But they had no idea how it can be.

How did they create land?

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Izanagi and Izanami had no idea of how they give birth to lands.

So Izanami proposed Izanagi to put his part of body into her body.

They tried but it didn’t work well.

Although they got a baby, but he looked like an ugly flog.

The baby was thrown away to the sea.

Why it didn’t work?

Because the proposal was made by female.

The process had must been started from man.

They changed the process and tried again.

It did work this time.

Izanami gave birth to eight lands one after another.

These lands was called “Oh-yashima”, now it’s called Japan.

After the Kuniumi story

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After they created Japan, they started to give birth to gods.

the god of house

the god of trees

the god of winds

the god of fields

and more.

Finally, Izanami gave birth to god of fire.

But because the baby was fire itself, she was burnt her body and died.

Izanagi tried to get her back from the land of death.

But he broke the promise not to see her face until they reached the ground, she was brought back to underworld.

Izanagi came back to ground alone and he washed his body.

Even from the water, baby gods were born one after another.

When he washed his left eye, the god of sun was born.

She is called Amaterasu (天照大御神), her grandchild started living in Japan and his descendants became Ten-noh after a long period of time.

(Japanese version of this article, see 世界最古から続く国「日本」の国生みの神話）