Amaterasu and the Heavenly Rock Cave

Susanoo, the storm god, is given rule of the sea by his father Izanagi but instead weeps and rages that he wishes to join his dead mother Izanami in the underworld, and before leaving heaven to face judgment for his conduct, he goes to take leave of his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. Suspicious of his intentions, Amaterasu meets him armed, and the two undertake a contest of creation, each producing deities from objects belonging to the other, a contest Susanoo claims to have won, and whose result emboldens him to a spree of destructive behavior in heaven that follows.

He breaks down the ridges between Amaterasu's rice paddies, fills her irrigation channels, and, most seriously, flays a piebald colt and hurls its body through the roof of the hall where Amaterasu's weaving maidens are at work, killing one of them in the shock. Grieved, frightened, and finally outraged past endurance, Amaterasu withdraws into the heavenly rock cave, Ama-no-Iwato, and seals its entrance with a great boulder. With the sun goddess hidden, the world and the high plain of heaven alike are plunged into permanent night, and disorder spreads among the gods, described in the texts as a chaos of countless malevolent spirits swarming like summer flies.

The assembled gods gather in council before the cave to devise a way to lure Amaterasu back out. They gather roosters to crow as if at dawn, and the smith god forges a great mirror while jewelers craft strings of curved beads, which are hung together on a sacred sakaki tree set up before the cave's entrance. The goddess Ame-no-Uzume then overturns a wooden tub, begins stamping and dancing on it, and, working herself into a trance, exposes her breasts and genitals, provoking the assembled gods into a roar of laughter so loud it shakes the heavens.

Hearing the laughter and unable to imagine its cause while she alone hides the sun, Amaterasu opens the boulder a crack to ask why the gods are rejoicing in her absence. She is told they rejoice because a deity more radiant than herself has appeared, and shown her own reflection in the mirror hung on the tree, she leans further out to look more closely, at which point the god Ame-no-Tajikarao, hidden beside the entrance, seizes her hand and pulls her fully out, while another god immediately stretches a rope across the cave mouth behind her so she cannot retreat. Light returns to the world, and Susanoo, judged guilty of the offenses that caused the crisis, is banished from heaven and descends to earth, where later stories tell of his own heroism killing the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi.