Sumo Sister

Question: In some of your earlier posts, you refer to Amaterasu's war dance frightening Susanoo. Any idea where I can find further details on this? The main legends I can find about her are in regards to her hiding in a cave or the creation of the 5 men and 3 swords, etc. As my new character is a son of Amaterasu (although adopted by Hachiman), I have some interest in this.

Sure thing! Amaterasu's war dance can be found in the Kojiki, and it's actually the beginning of that same story you mention in which Susanoo and Amaterasu create deities. A quick summary:

When Izanagi assigned his children to their places in the universe, he gave Amaterasu the heavens, Tsukiyomi the night and Susanoo the ocean. Susanoo, however, missed his mother Izanami and wept for her so strongly that he withered the growth of the world and ignored his duties. When Izanagi demanded to know why he wasn't doing his job, Susanoo told him that he missed his mother and wanted to see her (the implication being that Izanagi was wrong to leave her in Yomi); Izanagi was so angry with him that he banished him permanently and told him to go to the Underworld instead.

Susanoo left his father in a snit and went up to heaven, the force of his departure rattling the mountains and ground like an earthquake. Amaterasu heard him coming and assumed (pretty reasonably) that he was probably planning to come challenge her for leadership of the gods, or at least make some kind of ruckus. She tied up her hair in the fashion of male warriors (women at the time would have worn their hair loose), took her weapons, and when he approached performed a fearsome war dance so energetically that she slammed her legs into the hard ground all the way up to the thigh. Susanoo was so intimidated that he hastened to assure her that he wasn't planning any mischief and asked her to let him prove it by performing an honorable competition with him, and from there they went on to create the separate sets of deities from the sword and jewels.

Amaterasu's frightening stompy dance isn't fully described in the Kojiki, which probably assumed that readers would already know what it was, but it's probably similar to the "war dance" performed by modern sumo wrestlers at the beginning of matches, and to the ritual "war dances" performed in Shinto shrines to represent a priest wrestling with a spirit or kami. There's a lot of very cool and interesting stuff going on in this myth; Amaterasu is a woman in a very male-dominated culture who takes on notably masculine attributes and strength and intimidates the most notorious troublemaker of her pantheon to stand down and respect her, something that some scholars think may hearken back to a more ancient matriarchal Japanese society that has since vanished. Their confrontation also represents order (represented by Amaterasu) halting chaos (represented by Susanoo), something both gods continue to embody throughout their myths. The story's a good example of Amaterasu's curiously singular role in world myth; there are very few other pantheons with a female leader, few other goddesses who are physically strong and intimidating without also being insane or dangerous, and most major sun gods tend to be male as well, but Amaterasu breaks all these rules.

Susanoo's obvious sympathy for his lost mother is also very interesting, and something I'd love to see used in a game as a plot point; his falling out with Izanagi and subsequent departure to become an underworld deity is a moment when he pretty obviously takes sides, and may be one of the major reasons he's so often antagonistic toward Izanagi's more loyal children. Tsukiyomi may be something of a black sheep thanks to having permanently pissed off his sister, but Susanoo has angered the authority that created all of them, making him the most central creator of bad news bears in the Japanese pantheon.

Amaterasu's a badass lady, even by the standards of gods, and her brother is no slouch, either!