As I have mentioned on this blog before, every year I visit Koganeyama Jinja (黄金山神社) on Kinkazan (金華山), an island off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, in northeast Japan. This year, I went straight from Shikariwakë Jinja, so I spent three hours on rural local trains, rather than on the Shinkansen, but the boat over to the island was the same as ever.
This year is the year of the snake on the Chinese zodiac, and the jinja has a special matsuri every time this rolls around. There are a number of particular events, but if you go on an ordinary day, like I did, the difference is that the morning prayers are held in the haiden (拝殿) (“prayer hall”) rather than the kitōden (祈祷殿) (also “prayer hall”, so I will use the Japanese in this post).
Kinkazan is a mountain rising out of the sea. It isn’t a very high mountain, but almost the entire island is steep slopes, and the jinja is on one of those slopes. The jinja offices and accommodation are at one of the flat areas, along with the kitōden, and the haiden and main sanctuary are further up the slope, at another fairly flat area. Normally, formal prayers to the kami are offered in the kitōden, but you can always climb a flight of stone steps to pay your respects at the sanctuaries as well, and I normally do.
One of the standard ways of venerating this jinja is to stay overnight, and attend the early morning prayers. This is what I normally do (it was not possible during the pandemic). Generally, the morning prayers are held in the kitōden, but during an annual week in May, around the first day of the snake in that month, and for much of the year of the snake — from March to October — the morning prayers are held in the haiden. The first time I visited the jinja, in 2013, it was the year of the snake, so this year was the second time I have done this.
There were two people staying overnight for the prayers when I was there, and we gathered in the kitōden first, where the priests purified us. We then processed up a flight of wooden stairs to the haiden, where we took our seats.
On the floor. Because there are no stools in the haiden.
At Koganeyama Jinja, the haiden and the honden (本殿) are separate buildings, with a flight of stairs down to the ground, a short path, and then a flight of stairs up. There is a tent over the path in case of rain, which was good, because it was raining.
The first step of the matsuri was to open the doors to the honden. This is only done during the periods when the morning prayers are held in the haiden. The chief priest is given the key, and goes to unlock and open the doors, while everyone bows their heads. He then remains by the doors for almost the whole of the ceremony.
Offerings are placed, and a norito is read, but the priest reading it goes to the honden, and so it is all but impossible to hear, especially against rain. This is followed by sacred dance (kagura — 神楽) performed by a miko (巫女).
And then everyone offers tamagushi (玉串), and pays their respects to the kami. To do this, you get up, walk down the steps, and go to an an (案), an offering table, in front of the honden.
At this point I had been kneeling in seiza (正座) for over twenty minutes, and so standing up took a little while. And walking quickly was out of the question.
But I did manage it.
We then knelt again for the doors to be closed, and walked back down the stairs. By the time we got to the bottom, my legs had basically woken up again.
Over breakfast, I and the other attendee discussed it, and she suggested that it might have been fine to sit more casually — although neither of us had. (She seemed a bit more used to seiza than I am, but then she was born here.)
One of the priests came to talk to us at dinner the previous night, and said that they had had 450 (assuming I am remembering correctly — it was around that order) people at one of the main festivals, which meant that they could not all offer their tamagushi, or even fit in the haiden. We were trying to work out how many times the boats must have gone back and forth to get that many people onto the island at the same time — there are a limited number of boats, and I think the largest has a capacity of about fifty. Visiting the jinja has, it seems, become more popular, and some of the ferry companies are running scheduled services every day except Wednesday this year, and are likely to run Friday to Monday even in normal years. This makes it more practical to visit the island, but I’ve been chartering a boat from the same people since I first visited (again, with a break during the pandemic when they stopped doing it for a year), and I’m not going to stop now.