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The Meal That Never Stopped: Uke Mochi at Ise's Outer Shrine

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The Meal That Never Stopped: Uke Mochi at Ise's Outer Shrine

The atlas records Uke Mochi's veneration status as actively venerated in a living tradition, and the concrete form that standing takes today centers on Ise Jingu, the most important shrine complex in Shinto, specifically its Outer Shrine, the Geku, dedicated to Toyouke Omikami. Toyouke is widely identified with Uke Mochi and with her Kojiki counterpart Ogetsu-hime as the same food deity under different names across different texts and shrine traditions, called to Ise from Tanba province by imperial request specifically so that Amaterasu, enshrined at the Inner Shrine nearby, would have a deity to provide her meals. That founding purpose is not a dormant legend. The Geku's priests have performed Higoto Asagu Omike Sai, the twice daily food offering rite, morning and evening without interruption for roughly one thousand five hundred years, preparing rice, fish, seaweed, vegetables, fruit, salt and sake with fire kindled by the shrine's own traditional method and water drawn from its own well, and presenting the meal to Toyouke first and, through her, to Amaterasu. The rite is a real, dated, currently performed act of worship rather than a historical description, carried out on the same schedule today that it was centuries before living memory, and it is the clearest concrete instance available of Uke Mochi's own veneration continuing into the present rather than surviving only as a written myth.

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Uke Mochi, Figures
Sources
Ise Jingu, Geku (Toyouke Daijingu) (Ise City Tourism Association)
Ise City Tourism Association, Ise City Tourism Association, 2026Toyouke's identification with Uke Mochi and the Geku's twice-daily Higoto Asagu Omike Sai offering riteView the Source
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