Modern scholarship tends to read the mythic strata of the Nihon Shoki less as literal chronicle and more as a carefully shaped vision of cosmos, power, and identity. The divine genealogies and creation stories are treated as symbolic expressions of social order and political consolidation, especially the emergence of the Yamato court. By tracing the imperial line back to deities such as Amaterasu, the text fashions a kind of political theology, presenting imperial authority as grounded in a sacred cosmology rather than in mere human achievement. In this way, the mythic narratives reveal more about the ideological needs of the compilers than about a recoverable “beginning of things.”

At the same time, historians and religious scholars often discern in these myths echoes of real processes—tribal alliances, territorial expansion, and the subordination of regional cults to a central shrine system. Some adopt a cautious stance that allows for a “kernel” of historical memory beneath the divine figures, seeing certain gods or culture heroes as mythologized recollections of powerful chieftains or clan ancestors. Yet there is broad agreement that the divine age narratives cannot be treated as straightforward historical record; they are better approached as later projections cast back onto an obscure past. The myths thus function as a mirror, reflecting how the Nara court wished the origins of land, people, and authority to be imagined.

Scholars also emphasize the compilatory and syncretic nature of the work. The presence of multiple variants of the same myth suggests that the compilers were not simply preserving a single, pristine Shinto cosmology, but consciously arranging and reconciling competing traditions. Chinese historiographical models and continental cosmological ideas provide the literary and conceptual frame, within which indigenous narratives are ordered and given a new coherence. In this sense, the Nihon Shoki represents a decisive moment in the codification of what later came to be called Shinto, shaping a sense of “ancientness” that is itself a product of careful selection and redaction.

From a comparative and literary perspective, the mythological passages are studied alongside other East Asian traditions, revealing patterns of borrowing, adaptation, and selective appropriation that enhance Yamato prestige. Textual criticism attends to inconsistencies, repetitions, and editorial formulas, using them to trace the hands and intentions of the compilers. For spiritually minded readers, this scholarly work does not strip the myths of meaning; rather, it shows how cosmology, ritual, and power are woven together in a single tapestry. The myths of the Nihon Shoki can then be approached as profound symbolic narratives that disclose how early Japan sought to align heaven and earth, divine ancestry and human governance, into a unified sacred order.