Shrine (お宮/Omiya)

There are Shinto shrines all over Japan. I don’t think you could walk for two hundred metres in any village or town anywhere without coming across at least one small shrine in honour of the Gods. Most are unmanned, with only a collection box to help towards the maintenance. Many will be built near a particularly impressive rock, or perhaps a grand old tree (神木/shinboku/divine tree). All but the smallest are marked by a torii, an entrance arch, made of wood or, in the case of the grandest institutions, of reinforced concrete.

Apart from their spiritual function, shrines provide a refuge for trees. In most cities, the shrine precincts are, along with primary school grounds, the only places where trees are safe from property developers and urban planners. Amid the jumble of post-war suburbs, with almost no parks or other public spaces, only the shrines provide a haven from the relentless logic of the modern city. There the passer-by can relish the presence of three hundred year old camphor trees [楠木/kusunoki], and the birds that make their homes there.

In the modern city, however, not even the shrines are secure. Most have yielded to some extent to economic pressures, and are now only a fraction of their former size. One day, about ten years ago, I was travelling by train across the Shirakawa river in Kumamoto, when I saw that an avenue of trees leading to a shrine was being felled. Only a few trees nearest the shrine building were left.

Of course, this kind of thing had been happening for centuries, but I had never seen it. One grand old shrine in the centre of the city is almost completely given over to parked cars, with just a few embattled trees surviving.

Only the grandest shrines are staffed by priests and maintained properly. In Kumamoto City, there are four of these leading shrines: Fujisaki Shrine [藤崎神社], Kengun Shrine [健軍神社], Izumi Shrine [泉神社], and Katou Shrine [加藤神社].

Kengun Shrine is in the suburb of the same name, Kengun, [健軍ーit literally means “building the army”], and, as its location would suggest, it exudes the kind of militarist nationalism which links it to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasukuni houses the souls of all the Japanese war dead, including the so-called “Class A War Criminals”.

Katou Shrine is within the precincts of Kumamoto’s great castle, and is named after Katou Kiyomasa [加藤清正], the first daimyo (feudal lord) of Kumamoto, and builder of the castle. He sits at the bottom of the hill leading to the castle, in a bronze reincarnation wearing an enormous, sword-like hat at least as long as the rest of him.

Fujisaki Shrine backs onto the Shirakawa River, with a fine avenue of twisting pine trees and stone lanterns leading out to Route Three, the arterial highway cutting through the centre of the city. A slight detour would take me past the shrine on my bike route from home to the city.

Fujisaki used to play a key role in the world of sumo [相撲]. For hundreds of years, every new Yokozuna (Grand Champion) would come to Fujisaki for a blessing. This custom came to an abrupt end forty years ago when the fees demanded by the shrine led the Sumo federation to stop the visits.

Most of the six hundred and fifty thousand people who live in Kumamoto City visit one of these four grand shrines, either on New Year’s Eve or during the following three days. They receive a blessing, and toss money onto one of the huge tarpaulins which supplement the collection boxes for this most auspicious of periods.

On New Year’s Eve night, only the sacred mirror at the centre of the shrine is visible to the public. In search of divinity, the visitor finds a mirror.

I have visited all but Kengun Shrine at New Year, but most often I have been to Izumi Shrine because it is there that our Komparu Noh group does a special New Year performance each year.

The Noh stage is at the opposite end of Suizenji Kooen (Park) from the Shrine, and in daytime, the link between the two is obscured by the lake and the gardens in between. At midnight on New Year’s Eve though, the link is tangible.

As I sat on the Noh stage waiting for my dance to begin, I could see the flickering of the shrine lanterns and the glint of the reflections in the shrine mirror. Some years, it was below freezing point, and the number of Noh dancers would outnumber the spectators.

At half past eleven, the priests from the Shrine would cross the park, climb the steps onto the stage, and bless the performers.

One year, I noticed that Haruhisa [not his real name], one of my Noh comrades, was trying to stay as far away as possible from the priests, and was the last to get up, after bowing for the swinging-paper blessings. He told me later that he was afraid of being recognized by one of the priests. A year or two before, he had been one of a group from a multi-national theatre group which had ended a post-show party by going for a three a.m. dip in the pristine waters of the lake between the Noh stage and the shrine. The priest, who had been roused from his slumber by the carousing actors, had kicked them out and, as Haruhisa could remember his face, he was afraid the recognition would be mutual.

Within the shrine world there are various specialties. Those which have red arches are called Inari Shrines[稲荷], and are dedicated to the Fox God, the patron of all those involved in business, who need the kind of cunning intelligence associated with the shape-shifting fox.

There is one shrine which I was always keen to show visitors on our way to visit Mt. Aso. It lies just to the east of Kumamoto City, on the flatland surrounding the Shirakawa river. In Y’s family, the shrine is called the “chinchin” shrine. “Chinchin” is the familiar Japanese word for the genitals of either sex, and has no English translation.

In this case, the two-metre-long, wooden phallus on display outside the shrine building suggests that The Willy Shrine would probably be a reasonable translation. The wooden frontspiece is lovingly carved, with such realism that it could be used in the sex education of thirty metre tall giants.

The phallus on display is fifty years old, its predecessor having been washed away in the great flood of 1951. Amid the tragedy of that flood, I can imagine some down-river residents drawing some slight comic relief from the sight of a huge willy, cruising majestically down the flood-swollen river.