草薙剣
Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi
Also known as: Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven; one of the Three Imperial Regalia
Description
Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (Sword of the Gathering Clouds / Grass-Cutting Sword) is one of the Three Imperial Regalia of Japan — alongside the sacred mirror Yata-no-Kagami and the jewel Yasakani-no-Magatama — and the supreme symbol of the Japanese imperial throne's divine legitimacy. According to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto found the sword inside the body of the eight-headed serpent Yamato-no-Orochi after slaying it, and presented it to the sun goddess Amaterasu. It received the name 'Kusanagi' (grass-cutter) when the hero Yamato Takeru used it to cut back burning grass during an ambush in eastern Japan, escaping death by fire. The sword is now enshrined as the divine body (shintai) at Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya, one of Japan's most important shrines, where it has been venerated since antiquity. It is never displayed publicly and has not undergone modern scientific examination; its physical form remains unknown beyond fragmentary descriptions in ancient texts. During the Genpei War (1185), the Three Regalia were carried into battle by the Taira clan and partly lost at the naval battle of Dan-no-Ura — whether the present sword at Atsuta is the original or a replica made after that catastrophe remains debated by historians.
Legends & Stories
The myths surrounding Kusanagi span the entire arc of Japanese legendary history. Susanoo's slaying of the eight-headed Yamato-no-Orochi and the discovery of the heavenly sword within the serpent's tail is one of the oldest and most powerful dragon-slaying narratives in the world — one of the great creation myths in which order (the god, the blade, the gift) emerges from chaos (the monster, death, darkness). Yamato Takeru's story — the greatest hero of early Japanese legend, sent on impossible missions by his father, ultimately dying far from home in a foreign land — turns on the sword at its crucial moment: surrounded by burning grassland set alight by treacherous enemies, the hero cuts the grass with the divine blade and fires a counter-blaze, surviving by the sword's power and his own ingenuity. The sword's later history is equally dramatic: the theft attempt by the Korean monk Dōgyō in 668, who was turned back by divine storms; the catastrophe of Dan-no-Ura in 1185, when the eight-year-old Emperor Antoku and the Three Regalia plunged into the sea together — the mirror and jewel recovered, but the sword possibly lost forever to the waves of the Inland Sea, leaving only a replica at Atsuta (or perhaps the original did survive). In 2019, during the enthronement of Emperor Naruhito, the sword (or its sacred replica) was formally transferred in the ancient ceremony of Kenji-tō Shōkei no Gi, the Inheritance of the Sword and Jewel — as it has been at every imperial succession for at least fourteen hundred years. The sword that cannot be seen remains the most powerful object in Japan.