Sexuality in the Kojiki is the whole of statements on love, the body, procreation, and gender crossing recorded in the Kojiki, the oldest extant Japanese chronicle, compiled by O no Yasumaro in 712 CE.

Overview

Centred on the divine-age volume that opens the Kojiki, the text gathers many episodes of sexual union, bodily exposure, procreation, and gender transgression. These are read as reflecting a view of the body and the cosmos in ancient Japan before the later Confucian and Buddhist taboos took hold. Sex appears not as a merely private act but as a statement inseparable from the generative principle of the world, negotiation with the gods, and the festivals of the community. In mythology, folklore, and national-literature studies, scholars have continued to reconstruct the ancient mind through such records.

The creation myth and cosmic eros

At the opening of the Kojiki, the two deities Izanaki and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven and stir the chaotic sea with the heavenly jewelled spear, generating the island Onogoro. The motion of spear and brine is read in mythological terms as a cosmic coupling of male and female principles.

The two raise the heavenly pillar and compare their bodies: Izanami says her body is formed but has one place left unjoined; Izanaki says his body is formed but has one place left in excess. They agree to fill the unjoined place with the excess and so give birth to the land. The passage speaks directly of the genitals and their union while sublimating it into the principle of generating the realm, and it has been a central object of ancient-literature scholarship. In the first union, because the female Izanami spoke first, the malformed leech-child was born and set adrift in a reed boat. When Izanaki spoke first instead, the eight great islands were born in succession. Yoshida Atsuhiko reads this structure of reversal and correction as a layering of a pre-patriarchal matrilineal tradition with the patriarchal order of the compilation period.

Ame-no-Uzume and the dance at the rock cave

When Amaterasu, enraged at her brother Susanoo, hid in the heavenly rock cave and the world fell into darkness, the assembled gods commanded Ame-no-Uzume to dance. The Kojiki records that she took the vine of the heavenly Mount Kagu as a sash and bamboo leaves in her hands, and danced on an overturned tub, baring her breasts and pushing the cord of her skirt down to her genitals. The gods roared with laughter, and Amaterasu, drawn by the sound, opened the cave a crack and was pulled out.

The episode shows that sexual exposure functioned not as mere obscenity but as a magico-ritual act that revived the sun deity. The folklorist Obayashi Taryo noted that this tradition of “sacred nakedness” runs in common with fertility rites distributed widely from Southeast to Northeast Asia. Later inheritances appear in the gestures of Ame-no-Uzume in kagura sacred dance and in the naked festivals and exposure rites of various regions.

Yamato Takeru and gender crossing

The tale of Yamato Takeru in the middle volume contains an important case of gender crossing. Ordered by his father Emperor Keiko to strike down the Kumaso brothers, Yamato Takeru puts on robes given by his aunt Yamatohime, lets down his hair, and disguises himself as a young woman. He slips into the banquet, approaches the drunken Kumaso, and kills him with a sword. This cross-dressing has been read not merely as tactical disguise but as a gesture bearing a shamanic, androgynous sanctity. Yamato Takeru’s own relations with several wives, and the songs he composes on his eastern campaign, compose an archaic image of the hero in which martial valour and tender feeling coexist in a single person, a trace of a fluid view of body and personhood before the hardening of sexual dualism.

Spell-songs and the tradition of love

The Kojiki preserves more than a hundred songs exchanged by gods and heroes, many woven with the themes of love, courtship, and the bedchamber. In the scene where the deity Yachihoko (later Okuninushi) courts the maiden Nunakawahime, a long “divine speech” unfolds as he knocks at her door and waits through the night, exchanging songs. The pattern of courtship and consent, voiced through images of the natural world, has been regarded as the source of the later love-exchange poetry of the Man’yoshu. Episodes of love within the court, including the incestuous tragedy of Prince Karu and the concessions between Emperor Ojin and Emperor Nintoku over the lady Kaminaga, are likewise told with accompanying song, preserving the function of poetry as magical word-power.

A worldview before sexual taboo

Comparative-mythology scholarship has placed the sexual episodes of the Kojiki within mythic motifs spanning the Pacific rim and Eurasia. What these studies share is the suggestion that in early-eighth-century Japan sex was recognised less as an object of religious taboo than as a public force connected to cosmic generation, fertility, healing, and rule. In later ages, the spread of Confucian ethics, the Buddhist notion of female impurity, early-modern chastity norms, and modern sexological classification accumulated in layers, pushing sex into a private and concealed domain. The sexual expression of the Kojiki stands as testimony to a stratum of the body before that accumulation, a source to which modern folklore, national literature, and mythology repeatedly return.

Later influence

The elegant love expression of the Kokin Wakashu and Tales of Ise, the images of goddesses and shrine maidens in medieval Noh, the re-evaluation of sexual ritual in early-modern Shinto discourse, and Orikuchi Shinobu’s modern theory of iro-gonomi (the love of love) all read the sexual statements of the Kojiki anew in each age. Motoori Norinaga’s Kojiki-den (1798) established a method that rejected Confucian interpretation and read the chronicle as the prototype of mono no aware, a standpoint inherited by modern folklore and national-learning studies.

See also

• Sexuality in the Heian period
• Erotic poetry in the Man’yoshu
• Shunga
• Edo-period sexual culture