The Nihon Shoki places the episode during Emperor Jimmu's campaign to move his forces from Kyushu to the Yamato plain, a journey the chronicle treats as the founding conquest of the Japanese imperial line. After a costly defeat and the death of his brother, Jimmu lands at Kumano, on the rugged Kii peninsula, where the terrain grows so hostile that his army loses its way entirely among the mountains. At this point heaven intervenes: a great crow with three legs, sent down at Amaterasu's command in some versions and at the high god Takamimusubi's in others, appears to lead the army through the wilderness to Yamato, where Jimmu is eventually able to establish his rule and, by the traditional chronology, ascend as Japan's first emperor in 660 BCE. The bird functions in the narrative purely as an instrument of heavenly favor, confirming that Jimmu's conquest carries divine sanction even when his own military judgment has failed him.
Unlike Susanoo's serpent, Yatagarasu is never a threat to be overcome, only a messenger to be followed, and the myth gives it no independent personality or desire beyond fulfilling its errand. The name itself carries a related motif: yata means eight ata, an old unit of hand span length, so the name describes an enormous crow rather than counting anything eightfold in a literal sense, an echo of the same numerically stylized grandeur that marks Susanoo and the serpent story elsewhere in the same two chronicles.