A world-ending cataclysm is common to many mythologies. The Biblical flood narrative is the best known and follows a fairly typical pattern: wrathful deity, mass destruction, surviving remnant — in this case the righteous man Noah and his family. We gather from these tales that life to early humans felt dreadfully precarious — more so, even, than it may feel to us.
Japan's mythological account of the world on the brink of annihilation is in a class by itself. Other stories of its kind are tragic, terrifying. Japan's is comic, even bawdy.
The sun goddess goes into hiding. She has been offended by her brother the storm god, an unruly, malicious spirit who damages his sister's rice fields and fouls the hall where she has been celebrating the festival of first fruits. Outraged, the sun goddess withdraws into a cave. If that's the way the world is, she will decline to shine on it. The "eighty myriads of gods" take counsel. How can they lure her out? One of them, the "Dread Female of Heaven," lights a fire and dances a lewd dance, at which there is such hearty divine laughter that the sun goddess can't resist a peek outside to see what's going on. She is seized and dragged out, and the world is saved.