Izanagi.

Izanagi (伊邪那岐, Izanagi) is imagined less as a local tutelary spirit than as a mythic ancestor whose body stands near the beginning of order itself. In art he often appears as an archaic noble deity with the heavenly spear, already marked by rank and purpose rather than by the roughness of a wandering hero. His image belongs to threshold scenes: heaven above, formless water below, the road to Yomi behind him, or the river where purification remakes the world.

That visual role matters. Izanagi does not dominate Japanese mythology through a long series of exploits. He dominates it by appearing at the moments when separation first occurs, between sea and land, life and death, pollution and cleansing, ordinary gods and the greater powers born from his purification.

Izanagi's most important interactions are with Izanami, the land itself, and the dangerous border of the dead. With Izanami he carries out the first successful union after the failed pillar-circling rite, and the pair then produce islands and deities. After Izanami dies in childbirth, his grief drives him into Yomi, where interaction becomes taboo. He breaks the promise not to look, sees death in its ruined form, flees, and seals the entrance to the underworld with a boulder.

He then interacts with impurity as something that must be ritually transformed. The misogi at Awagihara is not incidental cleansing but a second beginning, because Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanoo emerge from it. Through Izanagi, the myth ties cosmic order to ritual action and explains why purification remains central to later Shinto practice.