Matsubara Itsukushima Shrine & Tonoura Kotohira Shrine

 

Matsubara is the small settlement below Hamada Castle on the mouth of the Hamada River.

The shrine right below the castle and immediately next to the sea is, not surprisingly, an Itsukushima Shrine...

There is a secondary Ebisu shrine in the grounds and hanging inside the common pairing of two masks of Ebisu and Daikoku. 2 of the 7 lucky gods, the pairing has deeper significance in this region as Daikoku is read as Okuninushi, and the father-son pair of Okuninushi and Ebisu are important in Izumo mythology.

The Itsukushima shrine is a branch of the famous one on Miyajima. This one only enshrined Ichikishima and not her sisters...

The chikaraishi stones were used in displays of strength at festivals...

The shrine has some very nice, large paintings.....

A few hundred meters up the narrow inlet towards Tonoura, the Kitamaebune port in earlier times, is a Kotohira Shrine set among a rocky outcropping.

This was originally a small Buddhist hermitage in 1711, but a few years later, following a dream, Kotohira Gongen was invited from Shikoku. In 1868, with the separation of Buddhas and Kami, it was turned into a shrine.

The previous post was on the Otoshi Shrine near Hamada Port

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Toji. Winter Solstice

I should have posted these a few weeks back in a more timely manner, but with the record levels of snow recently thoughts of winter and the return of the sun are on my mind. They are three paintings I did about 5 years ago on the theme of Toji, winter solstice.

 

They are titled, rather unimaginatively Toji, Toji 2, and Toji 3. They are acrylic on paper and measure 38 by 26 cms.

 

They are for sale, so if interested make me an offer :)

Amaterasu

Amaterasu. Acrylic on paper. 2006

I'm a painter as well as a mask-maker. This is my version of Amaterasu, the "Sun-Goddess", and though I use some shinto symbolism it also owes much to Changing Woman, one of the Navajo deities.

Any introductory text on Shinto will say that Amaterasu is the most important kami in Japan, but that is only true of contemporary shinto which is closely related to the emperor-centric State Shinto created in the late 19th Century.

Amaterasu is the kami that the current Imperial family claim descent from and that is why she is now pushed as the "head" kami. Before the 20th Century there were actually very few shrines dedicated to her.

The most well known myth of Amaterasu is the Iwato story wherein she hides herself in a cave and plunges the world into darkness and is later tricked into coming back out. The above shot is a scene from an Iwami Kagura performance of Iwato.

You can see a small selection of my paintings from the past 38 years here