Izumo Taisha

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On the western coast of Honshū, where the province of Izumo faces the cold Sea of Japan, a long avenue of pines runs downhill toward a wooden hall set against forested slopes. The approach descends rather than climbs, an unusual thing for a Japanese sanctuary; the visitor walks down into the precinct as toward something settled and deep. Across the front of the worship hall hangs a rope of plaited rice straw so thick a person could not encircle it, and behind it, raised on great pillars and reached by a single long flight of steps, stands the dwelling of the kami who once held the visible world and gave it away. This is Izumo Ōyashiro, the Grand Shrine of Izumo, called in the older speech simply the Great Shrine — Izumo Taisha — and it is among the oldest holy places in the land.

The shrine is the seat of Ōkuninushi, the Great Land-Master, the kami who made and ordered the land of Japan before the heavenly line came down to rule it. Where the cult of Amaterasu at Ise is the cult of the sun and of the imperial house descended from her, Izumo is the other pole of the kami world: the shrine of the earthly deities, the kunitsukami, and of the realm that lies out of sight behind the world of the living. Two great sanctuaries, two orders of the divine — the heavenly and the earthly, the seen and the unseen — and between them runs much of the architecture of the Japanese sacred.

The shrine raised as the price of the land

The founding of Izumo belongs not to record but to myth, and to a myth that the imperial chroniclers had particular reason to tell. The two oldest written sources for it — the Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, the Chronicles of Japan, completed in 720 — were compiled at the command of the Yamato court to set down the descent of the ruling house from the sun goddess and to bind the many local kami and clans into a single cosmic order with the emperor at its head. The Izumo story sits inside that project, and its political shape is worth marking: it is, among other things, an account of how the earthly powers yielded to the heavenly ones. Read with that in mind, it is also a tradition the shrine itself has held and lived by for more than a thousand years.

In the myth, the land of Japan — the Central Land of the Reed Plains, Ashihara-no-Nakatsukuni — had been made and pacified by Ōkuninushi, who is in the older tales a descendant or kinsman of the storm god Susanoo and who, with the dwarf-deity Sukunabikona, fixed the borders of the provinces, taught the arts of medicine and of farming, and ruled the visible world. But the heavenly deities in the High Plain of Heaven, led by Amaterasu and the high creator Takamimusubi, determined that the land should pass to the heavenly line. This is the kuni-yuzuri, the ceding of the land, the central episode of the Izumo cycle.

The heavenly kami sent envoys to demand the surrender, and the embassy went badly more than once. The first messenger looked down on the tumultuous land and would not go. The second, Ame-no-Hohi, descended to Ōkuninushi and was so won over that he sent back no report for three years. A third, Ame-no-Wakahiko, married a daughter of the land-master and held his peace for eight years, and when a heavenly pheasant came to question him he shot it; the arrow flew up to heaven and was hurled back down, and it killed him. Only the last envoys — the thunder-deity Takemikazuchi and his companion — brought the matter to its end, planting a sword upturned on the waves at the Inasa shore and seating themselves upon its point to put the demand to Ōkuninushi.

The land-master answered that he would yield, but he set a condition. In exchange for the visible world he asked that a dwelling be built for him — a palace, the texts say, rooted deep in the rock below and with its ridge-beams raised high toward the High Plain of Heaven. That dwelling is Izumo. The shrine is, in the myth’s own logic, the recompense for the cession: the heavenly order took the seen world, and the earthly master withdrew into a great hall and into the hidden realm of which he became lord. One of his sons, Takeminakata, refused the surrender and fought Takemikazuchi, was beaten, and fled to the lake of Suwa in the mountains of Shinano, vowing never to leave it. The rest of the earthly kami gave way.

So Izumo stands, in its own account, older than the reign of any emperor — a sanctuary built in the age of the kami, before the dividing of myth from history. The documentary record is thinner and later: the shrine is mentioned in the eighth-century Izumo Fudoki, the gazetteer of the province, and ranked among the highest sanctuaries in the tenth-century Engi-shiki, the great compendium of court ritual. Its priesthood, however, carries the myth directly into recorded time. The hereditary high priests of Izumo, the kokuso — the provincial chieftains of Izumo — trace their line to Ame-no-Hohi, the very envoy who came down to demand the land and stayed to serve its master. The office survives, split since the medieval period between two families, the Senge and the Kitajima, who still divide the shrine’s priestly duties between them.

The honden (main hall) of Izumo Taisha, in the taisha-zukuri style, the oldest of the shrine architectures. Photo by Saigen Jiro, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

The hall, the rope, and the four claps

The form of the main hall is itself an argument about antiquity. The honden of Izumo is built in the taisha-zukuri style — literally the grand-shrine style — which is reckoned the oldest of the surviving Japanese shrine architectures, older than the influence that came with Buddhism and continental building. It descends, by the usual reading, from the raised dwelling-house of the archaic age: a near-square hall with a steep gabled roof, lifted high on stout pillars, and entered not on the center of a side but off to one side, by a stair, so that the floor plan is asymmetrical and the interior turns about a central pillar. The present honden, raised in 1744 and repaired since, stands about twenty-four meters tall, the tallest shrine building in Japan.

But the shrine has long held that its hall once stood far taller. Tradition spoke of a honden of sixteen jō — some forty-eight meters — towering above the precinct on enormous pillars and reached by a stair said to run a hundred or more meters up to the door. A Heian-period record even claimed the building had once overtopped the hall of the Great Buddha at Nara, itself about forty-five meters. The claim was long treated with caution, for no building of such height seemed plausible for the period, and an old shrine drawing showing each of the hall’s columns as three great logs lashed together looked more like legend than engineering.

Then, in the spring of 2000, excavation within the precinct turned up the buried bases of three of the columns: the central pillar, a gable-end pillar, and a side pillar, each formed exactly as the old drawing showed — three trunks of Japanese cedar bound together with metal bands into a single column roughly three meters across. Radiocarbon dating and the documentary evidence point to these as remains of the main hall built in 1248. They do not prove a forty-eight-meter tower, and scholars remain careful about the exact height; but they show that the medieval Izumo honden was a vastly larger and taller structure than anything standing today, lifted on bundled pillars of a scale that matches the tradition. The memory of a giant hall, long carried only in story and in a diagram, was given the weight of dug earth. The recovered pillar-cluster, the uzubashira, is now displayed in the regional museum nearby.

The colossal shimenawa, the plaited straw rope of the kaguraden hall at Izumo Taisha, among the largest in Japan. Photo by the.Firebottle, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Slung across the front of the worship hall, and on a still greater scale across the nearby kaguraden, hangs the feature most visitors carry away: the shimenawa, the sacred rope of twisted rice straw that marks off holy ground and announces the presence of a kami. At most shrines the shimenawa is a modest band. At Izumo it is colossal — the rope on the kaguraden runs some thirteen and a half meters and weighs several tons, among the largest in the country — and its great pale coil, tapering at the ends, is one of the shrine’s signatures. The rope is renewed from time to time, woven by the people of the district, an act of devotion as much as of maintenance.

The worship itself is marked off too. At nearly every shrine in Japan the rite of obeisance is two bows, two claps of the hands, and a final bow. At Izumo the worshipper claps four times rather than twice — two for the petitioner and two, by one explanation, for the kami and for the bonds the kami is asked to tie. The doubled clap is among the small, exact signs that set Izumo apart from the rest of the shrine world, a difference in the grammar of prayer kept up for its own sake.

The sacred meaning: the lord of the unseen

What Ōkuninushi received in the cession was not nothing. The visible world — the rice fields, the offices of state, the affairs that pass before the eyes — went to the heavenly line and its imperial descendants. But the kakuriyo, the hidden world, the realm of things unseen, was given to the land-master to rule. This division is the theological heart of Izumo. Ise and the heavenly cult preside over the manifest order, over the polity and the visible blessings of the sun; Izumo presides over the unseen springs of that order — over fate, over the dead, over the bonds that hold beneath the surface of events and that no eye can follow. The land-master did not vanish in the cession; he withdrew to where the deeper causes are worked.

That withdrawal makes Izumo the shrine of musubi — the binding, generative force that ties things together, the same root that names the act of fastening and the act of begetting. Ōkuninushi is, above all, the kami who binds: who joins man to woman, family to family, fortune to person. The blessings sought at Izumo are not chiefly of harvest or victory but of relationship — en-musubi, the tying of bonds, and in the present day above all the bond of marriage. Where Ise is approached as the shrine of the realm and of the imperial house, Izumo is approached as the shrine of the human tie, the place one comes to ask that the right people be bound to one’s life. The land-master, having yielded the seen world, governs the connections that move within it.

The month of the gods

The reach of that office is shown once a year, in the tradition for which Izumo is most widely known. In the old lunar calendar the tenth month bore, across most of Japan, the name Kannazuki — written with characters that read as the month without gods. The reason given is that in this month the myriad kami of all the provinces leave their own shrines and travel to Izumo, so that everywhere else the gods are absent. At Izumo, and only at Izumo, the same month is called Kamiarizuki, the month with gods — the month of their presence. There the assembled deities are said to confer with Ōkuninushi as host, settling the year’s affairs: the matches to be made, the bonds to be tied, the fortunes to be allotted. The shrine receives the visiting kami in the rite of Kamiari-sai, held over the middle days of the tenth lunar month, and small lodging-halls within the precinct are kept for the gathered gods.

Here the registers must be kept apart. That the tenth month is called Kannazuki in the general calendar and Kamiarizuki in Izumo is a documented matter of usage, recorded for centuries. The reading of Kannazuki as the month without gods, however, is on philological grounds most likely a later folk etymology: the middle character was probably first written for its sound, with the syllable serving as a possessive particle, so that the name meant something closer to the month of the gods — the same sense Izumo kept — rather than their absence. The famous story of the deserted shrines and the great convocation at Izumo grew up around that re-reading. The story is no less alive for that; it is, within the tradition, simply true that the gods go to Izumo in the tenth month, and the festival enacts their coming. But the etymology that seems to explain the name came after the name itself.

Izumo, from the series Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces, by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1853 — the Hotohoto rite at the Grand Shrine. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Standing and afterlife

Through the long medieval and early-modern centuries Izumo lived, like nearly every great shrine, within the fused world of kami and buddhas. For roughly a thousand years the two were worshipped together under the doctrine of honji-suijaku, by which the kami were understood as local traces of the buddhas and bodhisattvas; temple buildings and Buddhist clergy stood within or beside shrine precincts, and Ōkuninushi, like other kami, drew an identification with a Buddhist figure. The pilgrimage to Izumo in the Edo period — pictured in the prints of the age — moved through that mingled landscape as a matter of course.

That world was broken by the state. In 1868 the new Meiji government ordered the shinbutsu bunri, the forced separation of kami from buddhas, and in the iconoclasm that followed, the haibutsu kishaku, Buddhist images and buildings were stripped from shrine grounds across the country. The “pure Shinto” that resulted — and the very notion of Shinto as a single bounded religion, set off from Buddhism — was substantially a modern construction, not the older diffuse reality of kami-worship, and it should not be read back onto Izumo’s syncretic past. In the same era the government drew the shrines into a state apparatus, ranking Izumo among the highest, the kanpei-taisha, supported and overseen by the state from 1871 until the dismantling of State Shinto after 1945. One of the two Izumo priestly houses, meanwhile, founded a Shinto sect of its own in the nineteenth century, Izumo Ōyashirokyō, which carried the cult of Ōkuninushi beyond the shrine.

The honden itself stands in a rhythm of renewal. Rather than the periodic rebuilding from scratch practiced at Ise, Izumo undergoes a great refurbishment of its existing hall at long intervals; the most recent, the Heisei renovation, returned the kami to the restored main hall in a ceremony in 2013 attended by thousands. The shrine has never been entered into the World Heritage rolls that name some other Japanese sanctuaries, but its standing within the country is undiminished, and its association with the binding of bonds has if anything grown: for couples and for those who hope to become couples, Izumo is the first place of pilgrimage in Japan, the house of the kami who joins one life to another.

What endures at Izumo is a particular shape of the divine. The shrine remembers a god who held the whole visible world and surrendered it, and who was not diminished but given the deeper realm in trade — the unseen, the fated, the bound. Down the long descending avenue, past the great rope and up the single stair, the worshipper claps four times and asks, of the lord of the hidden world, that a bond be tied.

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