Amaterasu is the asteroid #10385 or 1996 TL12, an asteroid of the Asteroid Main Belt. Even Japanese websites seem not to know anything about this asteroid, although it is named after a Japanese goddess. The asteroid seems to be not very remarkable at all.

Amaterasu is named after Amaterasu-ōmikami (天照大御神), the “the great august deity who shines in the heaven”. This is a goddess, who is the Sun. Shintō (神道) is the only religion (at least recent religion, after ancient Germans shall have thought similarly), where the Sun is a female deity. She belongs to the three main deities in Shintō (神道) and has many variants of her name. One of the reasons why Amaterasu (天照), as she is usually called, is an important goddess is that the first emperor of Japan was her grandson. The Japanese monarchy has until the present day had only one dynasty. Hence the lineage of the current emperor (Naruhito) can still be traced back, as was thoroughly recorded through the centuries, to Amaterasu (天照), the Sun. The Japanese Wikipedia shows under Amaterasu (天照) the whole lineage and also all of the shrines of the goddess. Only that an asteroid got named after her isn’t mentioned anywhere. Maybe this is too strange for the Japanese because Amaterasu (天照) is the Sun.

The asteroid Amaterasu describes obviously another facet of the Sun. It’s the last facet of the Sun, which I was able to find, unless the gods directly in charge of light should be considered as solar deities too. The only peculiarities of Amaterasu are that this asteroid hints to the Japanese culture and that this facet of the Sun is the Sun’s female side. But not as the female side of a male god is usually shown, this means as his wife. Instead the deity, that is male in almost all cultures, is female here. She doesn’t have a husband. Amaterasu (天照) created her children instead in the course of a challenge against her brother. He was banished into the underworld, so Amaterasu (天照) raised his children too. So Amaterasu as the female facet of the Sun includes the ability to create, but in the way, which male creator gods usually employ, instead of the way, which female creators usually employ. There actually isn’t any difference to a male Sun, except that Amaterasu is said to be female. The Japanese have adopted many other names for the Sun from other languages. The Japanese call the Sun even taiyō (太陽) and these kanji (漢字) hint emphatically to a male gender. Of course taiyō (太陽) should be used for the Sun, not for the asteroid Amaterasu. This asteroid represents a solar deity with the only extraordinary feature of being female. The last thing to consider here is that there apparently isn’t any equivalent in the sense of a male god among the lunar deities.