Izanami and Izanagi Creating the Japanese Islands

Japan's oldest chronicle, the Kojiki of 712, begins its story of the islands with two gods standing on the Floating Bridge of Heaven. Izanagi, the male deity, plunges a jewelled spear into the ocean below and stirs it. When he lifts it out, the brine dripping from its tip hardens into the first island. Eitaku's Japanese title names exactly that moment, probing the blue sea with the heavenly jewelled spear. He painted the scroll in the mid-1880s, when the Meiji government was building a modern state around the emperor, whose line the old chronicles traced back to these very gods. Izanagi holds the spear while Izanami stands beside him above the churning water. The scroll was bought by William Sturgis Bigelow, a Boston doctor who lived in Japan from 1882 to 1889 and collected thousands of works there. He deposited it at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1890 and gave it outright in 1911.