prefers death to the office
assigned him; whereupon he is forbidden to dwell in the same land
with Izanagi and has to make his abode in Omi province. Then he forms
the idea of visiting the "plain of high heaven" to bid farewell to
his sister, the goddess of the Sun.

*Mr. Chamberlain translates the title of this Kami "brave, swift,
impetuous, male, augustness."

But his journey is attended with such a shaking of mountains and
seething of rivers that the goddess, informed of his recalcitrancy
and distrusting his purpose, makes preparations to receive him in
warlike guise, by dressing her hair in male fashion (i.e. binding it
into knots), by tying up her skirt into the shape of trousers, by
winding a string of five hundred curved jewels round her head and
wrists, by slinging on her back two quivers containing a thousand
arrows and five hundred arrows respectively, by drawing a guard on
her left forearm, and by providing herself with a bow and a sword.

The Records and the Chronicles agree in ascribing to her such an
exercise of resolute force that she stamps her feet into the ground
as though it had been soft snow and scatters the earth about.
Susanoo, however, disavows all evil intentions, and agrees to prove
his sincerity by taking an oath and engaging in a Kami-producing
competition, the condition being that if his offspring be female, the
fact shall bear condemnatory import, but if male, the verdict shall
be in his favour. For the purpose of this trial, they stand on
opposite sides of a river (the Milky Way). Susanoo hands his sword to
Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami, who breaks it into three pieces, chews the
fragments, and blowing them from her mouth, produces three female
Kami. She then lends her string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo
and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the
fragments which are transformed into five male Kami. The beings thus
strangely produced have comparatively close connexions with the
mundane scheme, for the three female Kami--euphoniously designated
Kami of the torrent mist, Kami of the beautiful island, and Kami of
the cascade--become tutelary goddesses of the shrines in Chikuzen
province (or the sacred island Itsuku-shima), and two of the male
Kami become ancestors of seven and twelve families, respectively, of
hereditary nobles.

On the "high plain of heaven," however, trouble is not allayed. The
Sun goddess judges that since female Kami were produced from the
fragments of