Yomi

Yomi appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, Japan's two oldest chronicles, as the destination of Izanami, the creator goddess who dies after giving birth to the fire kami Kagutsuchi and descends to the underworld. Her husband Izanagi, grieving, follows her into Yomi and finds her in darkness, asking her to return with him to the world of the living. Izanami tells him she has already eaten the food of Yomi and can no longer leave, but asks him to wait while she consults the deities of the underworld, warning him not to look at her in the meantime.

Izanagi breaks the promise, lighting a comb to see her, and discovers her body rotting and infested, crawling with maggots and accompanied by thunder deities born from her decay. Horrified, he flees, and an enraged Izanami, humiliated at being seen in this state, sends the hideous hag of Yomi and an army of thunder deities and warriors after him. Izanagi escapes by sealing the pass between Yomi and the living world with a great boulder, and Izanami, trapped on the other side, vows to kill a thousand people a day from the land of the living in retaliation, to which Izanagi responds that he will cause fifteen hundred to be born each day, a bitter exchange that Shinto tradition reads as the origin of mortality itself.

Yomi's lasting significance in Shinto practice has less to do with its geography than with what happens immediately after Izanagi escapes it: standing at a river mouth, he performs misogi, ritual purification by washing, to cleanse himself of the death pollution, kegare, he picked up in the underworld, and this single act of washing is described as giving birth to a sequence of major kami directly from the water running off his body, including, when he washes his left eye, right eye and nose in turn, the sun goddess Amaterasu, the moon god Tsukuyomi and the storm god Susanoo, three of Shinto's most significant deities. This origin story is the founding narrative behind misogi and the wider Shinto emphasis on ritual purity and purification from the pollution of death, still practiced today through rites such as cold water ablution and the purification rituals performed at Shinto shrines before ceremonies and festivals.

Encyclopedia of Shinto scholarship treats the Yomi episode as one of the tradition's clearest illustrations of how Shinto handles death theologically: not through a developed doctrine of judgment or moral reward, which Yomi notably lacks compared to many other underworld realms in this atlas, but through an emphasis on avoiding and then ritually cleansing the pollution death brings, reflecting Shinto's broader focus on purity, correct ritual conduct and the maintenance of a right relationship with the kami over questions of an individual soul's ultimate moral fate.