The sun goddess Amaterasu, according to Japanese mythology, is the ancestor of the imperial house. According to researchers, at present, the sword of the goddess, considered the greatest shrine of the Shinto religion, may be in Moscow, although its exact location is unknown.
Japanese myths tell that the goddess Amaterasu had a beloved grandson - the heavenly prince Ninigi, whom she sent to earth to rule over people (one of his descendants was Jimmu, the first emperor of the island state). Before an important mission, Amaterasu presented her grandson with three relics: jasper pendants, a bronze mirror and a sword called Kusanagi no Tsurugi ("The sword that mows the grass").
“Shaking with the divine sword, punish those who disobey you,” the goddess admonished her messenger. The sword had a glorious background - Amaterasu's brother, the wind god Susanoo, discovered it in the tail of the eight-headed serpent he had killed.
For centuries, the Amaterasu sword was kept at the Atsuta-jingu shrine in the city of Nagoya, where it was buried in 113 AD. Ordinary citizens of Japan never saw him, and even at the coronation ceremony of emperors, the Kusanagi sword was carried out wrapped in several cloths. The Japanese historian Rai Sanyo assumed that the "sacred" weapon was made of iron or bronze and outwardly did not differ in any way from primitive ancient blades.
At the end of World War II, Emperor Hirohito formally ordered the Lord Keeper of the Seal to “at all costs” protect the insignia of imperial power, including the sword. According to one version, the weapon is still in the Atsuta temple. However, there is also an alternative point of view.
Having conquered Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese sought to replace the local semi-Shamanic beliefs with the "imperial" Shinto religion. There is evidence that for this purpose, the Manchu ruler Pu Yi in Tokyo was handed two of the three Japanese relics - a sword and a mirror of the goddess Amaterasu.
In 1946, Pu Yi said in a letter that in 1940 he visited the palace of Emperor Hirohito, in one of the halls of which he saw an altar with a sword and a mirror. Then the Japanese emperor invited Pu Yi to "accept" these relics.
Pu Yi's stay in Tokyo is also mentioned in the Soviet note "On Japanese domination in Manchuria." It says that "the spirit of the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu Oomikami" was invited to the palace, and Pu Yi was forced to bow down to her.
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"After the surrender, Toshima and I took the mirrors of the Kenkoku Shinbio and Kenkoku Chu-reibio temples, as well as the sword, they wanted to take to Japan to be handed over to the appropriate persons," Pu Yi argued during the Red Army's offensive against Manchuria in August 1945 Pu Yi was captured at the airfield in Mukden. In the USSR, where he was immediately sent, the ruler of Manchukuo took with him several leather suitcases with family treasures - among them, presumably, lay the legacy of the goddess Amaterasu.
Pu Yi strongly feared that he would be tried as a war criminal, so he tried to behave as loyally as possible towards the Russians. In the spring of 1946, hoping for Stalin's mercy, he agreed to transfer his property to the Soviet Union "for the restoration of the national economy." According to the inventory made in Khabarovsk, it was about 111 precious items. The relics of the goddess Amaterasu were not mentioned in the document. However, as it turned out, Pu Yi hid "the best jewelry", asking his nephew to hide them in a suitcase with a double bottom.
In 2017, on the pages of the Rodina magazine, the famous publicist Dmitry Likhanov said that he had seen a photograph of Amaterasu's relics in the KGB archives. Likhanov put forward a version that the sword and mirror of the Japanese emperors are kept in Moscow to this day.
“The people who keep them, I think, quite deliberately surrounded the relics with a veil of hoaxes, claiming that they were guarded by demons, that they were bewitched, that it was better not to touch them and even look at them,” the author says. It remains to add that if the sacred sword for the Japanese were indeed in Russia, it could become a good argument in negotiations with Tokyo on the Kuril Islands issue.
Timur Sagdiev