This paper deals with the political function of Amaterasu in the Modern Japanese Imperial State from the perspective of gender theory. What exactly was Amaterasu? First, as the ancestral goddess,she was the legitimating principle of the modern Japanese Imperial State. Second, Amaterasu was a cross-dressing goddess, an androgynous being. Androgyny was used as a sign that pointed to a being that lies beyond Power-Law; at the same time it was this higher being who defined Power-Law. In other words, androgyny was seen as the source of Power. For this reason, the attribute of hermaphroditism was included in Amaterasu as an icon of "Legitimacy" during the Restoration period and its changing social order. However, because the national order was constituted in a masculinist form, this hermaphroditic element came to be seen as threatening to patriarchy. Even so, the state could not let go of Amaterasu as a symbol of the source of authority. In the process of formation of the modern imperial nation-state, while the emperor and the government appropriated Amaterasu, her androgynous attributes were forcibly domesticated through social norms. Amaterasu could not be represented in national textbooks, staging her sacred character. This prohibition of representation symbolized at the same time the attribute of "great womanhood" (her symbolic hermaphroditism).
Despite the Meiji system's consideration of her hermaphroditic attributes to be heretical, these attributes did not entirely disappear. On the one hand, Amaterasu's attributes became the fundamental support of the women's equal rights movement; on the other hand, as the hall-mark of divinity that overcomes the worldly dimension of existence, Amaterasu's attributes were incorporated by cults whose aims were social transformation. Ironically, in the second half of the Meiji period, Amaterasu's hermaphroditism, the source of power, was effaced from the sphere of "Legitimacy," to remain only in the realm of "Heresy."
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