Japan's emperors traced their line to a sun goddess born from an eye
In the Kojiki, Japan's oldest book, the god Izanagi washes his left eye after a failed trip to the underworld and the sun goddess Amaterasu appears. She is set to rule heaven, and through her grandson Ninigi she became the mythical ancestress of the imperial family. Her main shrine at Ise remains among Shinto's holiest places.
Her full title, Amaterasu Omikami, is not quite a name. Amaterasu is a verb form meaning shining in heaven, built from ama, sky, and teru, to shine, plus an honorific, and it modifies omikami, great august deity. The whole thing reads as The Great August Goddess Who Shines in Heaven. Translators have argued over nuance: Basil Hall Chamberlain, following Motoori Norinaga, insisted the ending is honorific rather than causative, so she shines in heaven rather than making heaven shine. Another name, Ohirume, is usually read as great woman of the sun, though Orikuchi Shinobu proposed she was once a male sun god's wife or priestess.
The two earliest chronicles, the Kojiki of about 712 and the Nihon Shoki of 720, agree she is Izanagi's daughter and older sister of Tsukuyomi, the moon, and Susanoo, the storm. The Kojiki has the moon born from his right eye and the storm god from his nose. The Shoki's main version instead has Izanagi and Izanami produce her so radiant that they sent her up to heaven by a ladder, while a variant has Izanagi holding a bronze mirror.
One Shoki story explains day and night. Tsukuyomi killed the food goddess Ukemochi for serving him food from her mouth, and Amaterasu, appalled, parted from him for good. From the goddess's body grew rice, millet, beans and silkworms, and Amaterasu had the seeds sown and reeled silk in her mouth, the origin of farming and silk making.
Her brother Susanoo caused her greatest crisis. Expelled for his wailing, he came to say goodbye; she met him in armour, and a ritual contest produced gods and goddesses from objects they chewed. Claiming victory, he wrecked her rice fields and defiled her palace, and after one attack on her weaving hall left a weaving maiden dead, Amaterasu shut herself in the Heavenly Rock Cave, plunging the world into darkness.
Source: Amaterasu
