Shikariwakë Jinja

At the weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in a matsuri at Shikariwakë Jinja (website in Japanese only) in Shiwa, Iwatë Prefecture. The jinja is also known as Akaishi (“Red Rock”) Jinja, because it is red, and has a rock in it.

This is the red rock. The information board behind it is, unfortunately, forty years old, and virtually illegible. After the mikoshi procession, I saw children throwing stones and trying to land them on top of the rock. This sort of thing is common, and the idea is that it is good luck if your stone stays there.

The jinja claims to have been founded in 804, and this is probably true; it appears in historical records in 852, and it is the most northern of the 3,000 or so jinja recorded in the Engishiki, which was compiled at the beginning of the tenth century. If they were faking antiquity, they’d probably fake a bit more than 48 years… Its precincts used to include thousand-year-old cedars, but they were right on the bank of the Kitakami River, and the government asked the jinja to move, so that they could build flood prevention works. This also involved cutting down all the trees. (Am I absolutely certain that the value of the trees was taken into account? No. But it may have been. Flooding is a serious issue in Japan — we had four inches of rain in one hour where I live yesterday —, and the need to protect against it could have outweighed the value of that (fairly small) forest.)

When the government does this, they pay for the land and rebuilding, because constitutionally they have to. The new site for the jinja is very close to the old site, just a bit further from the river, and a new sanctuary has been built (I will say more about that in a separate post). However, the new site had no sacred forest, and that is how I first got connected to the jinja. The Japanese Festival and Forest Association (website almost entirely in Japanese), of which I am a member, helped run a couple of crowdfundings to plant a new forest along one side of the new precincts, and I contributed. (I think I mentioned the first one here, a couple of years ago.) This has now run for two years, and the plan is to do one more, to finish planting the forest. I don’t have photographs, because the forest is being planted on a slope down away from the precincts, and thus is hard to photograph from the precincts at the moment. Thanks to Apple Maps sending me to the old site, I did see the planting, and you can easily distinguish the two blocks that have been done so far. I am pretty sure that the slope I climbed to get into the jinja will be impassable after next year’s planting.

This year, the jinja held a major festival to mark 1220 years since its foundation. (Yes, my arithmetic suggests that should have been last year as well, but they may have run it for a year from the traditional foundation date — had I looked up the dates before I went, I would have asked.) The event I went to was, I think, the climax, as it was the annual Grand Matsuri, the Reisai.

This runs over three days, although I only participated in one of them. On Friday September 5^th, the jinja held a dedication for their new torii (more about that later, as well) and the “pre-matsuri”. September 6^th was the mikoshi procession, and that was what I was there to help with. The Reisai itself was held on the 7^th, the Sunday, but I was on my way elsewhere that day.

The JFFA recruited volunteers to help with the mikoshi procession, and I signed up. But I think I will have to talk about the day itself in the next post.