Afterpants: Nether Regions pt 31 (YOMI黄泉)

Absolutely one of my fav Nether Regions.

I even took a train from Izumo to the Izanami Shrine where the entrance to the underworld is supposed to be. Turns out, it's not even there...I had to walk another kilometer to the other side of the mountain to find it!

Though I may have mentioned in previous post, I was wearing my black kimono and drinking Sake at the underworld entrance and unwittingly frightened a local woman who was walking through the woods nearby.

Now, although you can't see it, beyond those short pines there are 3 huge boulders which are said to"block the entrance" to Yomi where it said that Izanagi placed them.

Yomi is the original Japanese underworld...not to be confused with Jigoku

or Ne-no-Kuni.

(The "Yomi" link is to Kokugakuin University, one of the 2 recognized schools for Kunnushi/Shinto priests)

The story goes like this: Once upon a time...the Goddess Izanami gave birth to the Kami of Fire...which killed her. She went to Yomi. Her husband followed her and ran screaming in terror when he saw her undead face. He sealed the entrance with those big rocks. A few thousand years later a gaijin in a black kimono frightened a woman and laughed a little because he was drinking Sake on the boulders!!!

Anyway, Yomi is more like the Kur or Hades, because it's an underworld for everyone regardless of how they behaved life. It's dark, there's basically nothing to do. But we at Afterpants like our afterlives to be generally non-discriminatory/ non-judgemental...sort of...

In Shinto, most practitioners believe in the 3-tierd cosmology...The heavens where the big kami live, the earth where humans and smaller kami live and the underworld. (There are Kami there too, I mean...8,000,000 gods...you have to put them somewhere right??

I'll use underwear context to describe Yomi as...uhmmm...jet black boxer briefs, maybe with white piping, they fit really well and you'd like to wear them every day but you can't because the elastic would wear out really quickly...

Afterpants gives Yomi a whopping 5 out of 5 Hellbriefs!