Iya Shrine

Iya Jinja

Iya Shrine is a very ancient shrine, said by some sources to be the oldest shrine in Izumo. It is listed in the Izumo Fudoki, menstioned in the Nihon Shoki, and listed in the Engi Shiki. It is one of the "Six Shrines of Ou", Ou being the old name for the district and the site of government in the Nara Period.

The primary kami is Izanami, and near here is the entrance to the underworld (Yomi) where her husband/brother Izanagi fled from after visiting her there. Also enshrined here are Okuninushi, his son Kotoshironushi whose main shrine is across the lagoon at Mihonoseki, and Sukunabikona a sidekick of Okuninushi who "built" the country with him.

The third layer of kami enshrined in the main honden is Takeminakata, the son of Okuninushi who didnt't want to cede the land the the emissary of Amaterasu and who is the main kami of Suwa shrines, and Futsunushi, the ancestor of the Mononobe who was the emissary from Amaterasu.

There are some secondary shrines in the grounds including two Ebisu shrines and a Tenmangu, but the most interesting is the Karakuni shrine. Karakuni means "Korea", and there are quite a few of them in the Izumo area, and they enshrine Susano and his son Isotake. According to Izumo mythology they both came to Izumo from the Korean Penisula and also made visits back there, something that is widely ignored by the nationalists here.

There is also an altar to Kojin and an Inari shrine, but I will post on them next.

Toda Hachimangu part 2

This is a follow on post from the previous. The defensive gate at Toda Hachimangu.

As a Hachimangu, the enshrined deity is Hachiman, which came to be equated with Ojin, the emperor whose name was Homuda Wake, as well as his mother Jingu. As the tutelary deity for samurai, there is almost always one associated with castles. The interior has a nice ceiling painting of a dragon.

The largest of the secondary shrines within the grounds is a Takeuchi Shrine just to the left of the main shrine.
Enshrining Takenouchinosukune, a government minister who lived for close to 300 years advising 5 emperors. There is a Takenouchi and Hachiman combined shrine on the southern outskirts of Matsue, but I believe this one is the original and the former was constructed after the castle was moved from here to Matsue.

Thgere are other smaller shrines including an Ebisu, Taisha, and a Sakatoke shrine. Sakatoke seems to be another name of Oyamatsumi, elder brother of Amaterasu and Susano.

There is also a Katsuhi Shrine, which was the original shrine on the mountaintop opposite. The shrine was moved here before the Hachimangu was built. A Katsuhi shrine was rebuilt on the mountain top after the castle was demolished and I will find out more about it before I post about it next week.

Ushio Shrine

Ushio Shrine was the last shrine I visited before heading over the pass out of the Hi watershed. It is named after the Ushio clan who had a small "castle" on top of the mountain behind the shrine. They were vassals of the Amago.

It is yet another shrine in the area that is listed in both the Izumo Fudoki, and the Engi Shiki. The main kami enshrined here is Unojihiko, the same kami enshrined at Unochi Shrine that I visited earlier in the pilgrimage.
For details I refer you to that post. It is worth mentioning that according to the myth he caused Lake Shinji to rise in an attempt to drown his father, and supposedly the water level reached this point, which is quite remarkable considering how much higher this place is than Unochi Shrine.

Within the grounds are smaller shrines to Hachiman, Inari, Ebisu, and Aragami.

From here the road forks, the road heading north goes to Suga Shrine, a major shrine connected to Susano. The road I take heads west to Kumano Taisha, once the most important shrine in Izumo, also connected to Susano.

Ebisu Shrine, Naka, Tokushima

After coming down from Tairyuji I stopped in at the local Ebisu Shrine. The villagers were cleaning up after the flood caused by the typhoon the day before, hence the pile of rice.

There were some enormous Giant Cedars lining the path into the shrine and a statue of Chosokabe the warlord who ruled over all of Shikoku for a while before Hideyoshi sent his armies in.

There was no signboard so I could not find out anything about what secondary shrines and kami there were, other than the obvious main kami Ebisu, no equated with Kotoshironushi. There was a zuijinmon with a fine pair of zuijin.

The shrine was built on the site of the former Niu castle, though I guess it must have been quite a small and unimportant castle.

Ikui Shrine

Ikui Shrine is a small shrine in Katsuura Town between temples 19 and 20 of the Shikoku Pilgrimage.

Ikui is another way of reading Ebisu, and this is the kami enshrined here, rather Kotoshironushi, the official identity of Ebisu since the Meiji Period.

The shrine is listed in the Engi Shiki, a court document from the early tenth Century that, among other things, lists 2,861 shrines across Japan that received annual offerings from the Imperial Court.

This website has details of all the shrines in the Engi Shiki, unfortunately only in Japanese.

Iwami 33 Kannon Pilgrimage: Kitahachimangu

Though I have yet to finish walking the Izumo 33 Kannon Pilgrimage Ive started walking the Iwami 33 Kannon. Being local it means I can do it in one day sections when the weather window allows. I had wanted to do the old Iwami 33 but many of the temples on it no longer exist... victims of Haibutsu Kishaku I suspect.

The old and the new pilgrimages both share a majority of temples but the older one started in Iwami Ginzan and the new one starts in Oda. On my way from Oda Station to the first temple I stopped in at Kita Hachimangu.

A fairly typical Hachiman Shrine, though it was founded in the ninth century, much earlier than many others, and unusually is a branch of the original Usa Hachiman rather than the Kyoto Iwashimizu Hachiman. There are many secondary shrines in the grounds, Ebisu, Aragami, Awashima, Konpira etc

The most interesting of the secondary shrines is this Kinashi Shrine. It enshrines Susano and connects to when he stopped here on his journey from Sila to Izumo. According to local legends he, along with local kami, travelled back and forth between Izumo and Korea from a point a few miles down the coast... Even more interesting is that this shrine was the original shrine here before the Hachimangu was established.

Month of Little Sleep part 10

On Sunday 21st October we went to the Omoto Matsuri up in the small settlement of Yudani. It is a small settlement, getting smaller. Only 34 households remain and they are mostly old folks...... there are no kids. The Omoto Matsuris only occur every 7 years and are expensive affairs and only 34 families are left to fund it. It ended up being a fantastic night with all the hallmarks of a true matsuri.... friendliness, generosity, inebriation, humor etc.... I shot over a thousand photos but choose just a handful.....

After the initial rituals and ceremonies the first kagura was Shihogatame, a dance unique to Omoto Kagura but which is similar to Kamimukae in regular Iwami kagura.

At a usual ceremony there may be half a dozen to a dozen offerings placed on the altar, but given the importance of Omoto rituals there will be anything from 30 to 50 different items....

Possibly my favorite Omoto kagura "dance" is Tengai, unique to Omoto. I have seen it performed by priests and also by kagura dancers, but in my experience it is the priests who put on a more dynamic dance.....



The Ebisu dance was unique, for me at least, in several respects. usually Ebisu dances alone, or sometimes with Daikoku, and its usually just a pantomime with him throwing candy to the crowd and then catching a Sea Bream. This was the "complete" Ebisu dance with the first part danced by a dancer as a priest, then with Ebisu, and then finally the "usual" Ebisu dance. usually the fish caught by Ebisu is made out of paper, but here they used the actual fish that had been on the altar as offering to Omoto.

At 6am the final ritual/dance took place and this is where possession, kamigakari, will take place, if it take place. The rope snake representing Omoto is swung violently backwards and forwards by the priests. To the rear you can see the villager who had been designated to be the recipient of possession. kamigakari did not occur.

The Month of Little Sleep part 4

Around 2:30am the kagura group took a break, something I have never seen before. I suspect that as the village has shrunk, so has the kagura group, and fewer members means each must do more and therefore not get any breaks during the long night. The audience took the opportunity to pull out some food and spread out... All night long Mr Yama operating the barbecue grill outside had been passing free food into us.... fried noodles, barbecued squid, barbecued crab legs..... along with copious amounts of cold beer and sake, so we were full but could not refuse the offers from different groups in the audience who insisted we join them and share their food....this, for me, is the essence of matsuri....

After the break the action started up  with the Oeyama dance with lots of demons including the favorite of the audience, a junior demon...

The spiders web trapped the hero but he was of course able to free himself and kill the demon...

next up was Iwato, usually one of the first dances at a matsuri....

And then Ebisu, ably assisted by junior Ebisu, distributing lucky candy to everyone in the audience...

The penultimate dance was Shoki.......

Outside the sky was lightening and more people had been arriving...... in the countryside people get up at 5... and so it was time for the finale, Susano's battle with the multiheaded Orochi.... It was a small kagura group, so there were only four heads to the serpent, but even so they took all the dance space and spilled out into the audience. An exciting end to a great night..... time to go home to bed and rest up..... in 3 days it would be an Omoto Matsuri up in Nakano....

Kanzui Matsuri 6

So, it's about one-thirty in the morning and the sixth dance of the matsuri begins, Daikoku and Ebisu.

There is not really a story, rather the two characters, both members of the 7 Lucky Gods of Japan, engage in pantomime.

Daikoku was originally a Hindu warrior deity, but in Japan by the 15th century he had become the jolly, pudgy character associated with wealth and good fortune. Hitting the people on the head with his magic mallet will bring them good fortune.

When Ebisu dances he often goes through the comedic routine of catching a Sea Bream.

Daikoku and Ebisu are often seen as a father-son pair through the association with Okuninushi (written with the same kanji as daikoku) and Kotoshironushi, seen as Ebisu.

What the kids in the audience have been waiting for is for the lucky candy that Ebisu throws out.....

Vacation 2011 Day1: Sumiyoshi Shrine

The last part of my first day of vacation I was in Hakata and I visited the Sumiyoshi Shrine there.

The head Sumiyoshi Shrine is in Osaka, but the one in Hakata is believed to be the original one.

The main kami are Sokotsutsuo-no-kami, Nakatsutsuo-no-kami and Uwatsutsuo-no-kami, which are kami connected with navigation and safe travel by sea. the mythical "Empress" Jingu is also now enshrined here as the myths say she received oracles from the Sumiyoshi Kami before her mythical "conquest" of Korea.

I recently read that the 3 kami were originally aspects of the undersea Dragon King, a kami long associated with distant lands.

Travellers and emissaries going from Yamato to Korea and China would first stop at the Sumiyoshi Taisha in Naniwa (Osaka) and then visit other Sumiyoshi Shrines along the Inland Sea until finally leaving from Hakata.

Its a nice oasis of green in an otherwise built-up area and has some fine Zuijin and komainu.

There is a secondary shrine to Amaterasu in the grounds, and an Ebisu shrine in front.

As a major shrine it is able to employ Miko.

Behind the main hall are 2 Inari shrines.

Mefu Shrine

Mefu Shrine is yet another shrine in Matsue that is listed in the 8th Century Izumo Fudoki which means it was in existence for about 1,000 years before Matsue was built.

It is located not far from the station, on the south bank of the waterway that connects Lake Shinji with Nakaumi and the sea, so its not surprising that the main kami is Haya Akitsuhi the kami of inlets and straits,created by Izanagi and Izanami.

A secondary group of kami are Isotake and his 2 sisters Oyatsuhime and Tsumatsuhime, the three children of Susano that came to Japan with him from Korea.

Behind the main honden are a couple of shrines to Funadama, the kami of boats, and Konpira the kami of safe journeys

Other smaller shrines include Ebisu, Wadatsumi, the dragon kami of the sea, and an Aragami. The shrine is noted for a fine pair of komainu.