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Japanese mythology is traced back two thousand years, embedded in Shinto and Buddhist religions. Its stories and teachings explain and give meaning to the nature of the world, the supernatural, and the origins and significance of life. Japanese mythology offers amaranthine devotion to the ritual practices and religious events celebrating the works of a vast number of deities and spirits. The mythology weaves stories about mythological characters, humans, animals, spirits, and magical creatures affecting events important to the lives of the Japanese, and where they live in Japan from heaven and the underworld. Japanese mythology altered over the centuries, as people from other countries and cultures interacted with the Japanese. Buddhism originated in India, spread across China and Korea, working into Japanese mythology with aeonian force. Taoism with its predominance of nature guiding world order came later to Japan, bringing myths about particular rocks, trees, or a mountain.

The Nihon shoki (nee-HOHN SHOH-kee; Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to a.d. 697, 1896) was a thirty-volume set of books, written in Chinese by the principal compiler, Prince Toneri Shinnou, with the help of O no Yasumaro. The emperor Temmu (r. 672-686) commissioned the work, along with the Kojiki (712 c.e.; Records of Ancient Matters, 1883), to justify the existence and power of the imperial line. The Nihon shoki begins with a story of the creation of the world and links this “time of the gods” to the reign of the first emperor, Jimmu (beginning in 660 b.c.e. according to legend). It claims a divine origin for the emperor, thus providing a rationale for the political authority that the imperial line had retained throughout Japanese history.

Writing came to the Japanese through the Korean scribe Wani, who flourished in the late fourth-early fifth century c.e. When Wani arrived, most likely in 404, he brought with him a collection of Chinese classics, from which the Japanese devised a system of writing their own language. One of the oldest inscriptions, in which spoken Japanese is recorded using the pronunciations of Chinese characters, has survived on a Japanese iron sword, inscribed in 471 and re-deciphered in 1978.