Izumo Taisha

Izumo is the other centre of Shinto, and the calendar records the fact in a way that has survived every attempt to organise Japanese religion around a single point.

The month without gods

The tenth lunar month is called Kannazuki across most of Japan, the month without gods. The kami are held to have left, and shrines elsewhere are correspondingly quiet.

In Izumo the same month is called Kamiarizuki, the month with gods. They have all come here.

They are received at a formal welcoming rite on the shore and lodged in long buildings within the precinct built for the purpose. What they are held to be doing is deciding the coming year's relationships, who will be joined to whom, which is why Izumo is the great shrine for matters of marriage and connection.

What that implies

A national calendar in which the entire pantheon annually leaves the imperial centre and assembles somewhere else is not a small thing.

It is the clearest surviving trace of a religious geography with two centres rather than one, and of the fact that the Yamato court's account of itself (Amaterasu, Ise, the imperial line), was imposed on a landscape that already had other arrangements.

The mythology records the tension rather than hiding it. Okuninushi, the kami of Izumo, built and ruled the land, and then ceded it to the heavenly descendants, the kuni-yuzuri, the transfer of the land. The great shrine is, in the mythological account, part of what he was given in return for handing over.

That is a story told by the winners which nonetheless concedes that someone else was there first and had to be dealt with.

The building

There is no founding date in the records, and the claim that Izumo is older than Ise is a claim rather than a fact.

The present main hall dates from 1744 and stands twenty-four metres high, the tallest shrine building in Japan.

A Heian-period document of around 950 ranks the buildings of Japan by height and implies an Izumo hall of roughly twice that: some forty-eight metres, on enormous pillars, reached by a long stairway.

This was dismissed for centuries as exaggeration. Then, in 2000, excavation in the precinct uncovered the remains of massive bundled pillars, clusters of three trunks bound as single columns, over three metres across, consistent with the described structure.

It is a rare case of archaeology confirming a textual claim that scholarship had written off.

Practice

Worship at Izumo follows the shrine's own usage rather than the national convention, and the enormous shimenawa ropes at its gates are among the largest in Japan.

The shrine is rebuilt on a cycle of sixty to seventy years rather than Ise's twenty, most recently completed in 2013.

Izumo Taisha's main hall is hung with the largest sacred rope in Japan, and the god enshrined there is approached less for cosmic authority than for help finding a partner.

A rope too heavy to lift by hand

The shrine's shimenawa, a braided rope marking sacred space, is the largest of its kind in Japan, weighing several tonnes and requiring specialised equipment and teams of workers to install, a scale that makes it one of the shrine's most immediately recognisable features independent of the building it hangs from.

An older architectural style than Ise's

Izumo Taisha's architecture follows the taisha-zukuri style, considered one of the oldest surviving styles of Shinto shrine architecture, distinct from the style periodically rebuilt at Ise, and historical accounts describe the shrine's main hall as having once stood considerably taller than its present height, though the exact original scale remains debated among architectural historians.

A god for relationships, not just cosmology

The shrine enshrines Okuninushi, a deity closely associated with matchmaking, marriage and human relationships, distinguishing Izumo's devotional character from shrines centred on Amaterasu, and drawing pilgrims specifically seeking success in romantic and marital matters, a popular association reflected in contemporary Japanese wedding and dating culture.