S P O T ／ SPOT-044

Taga Taisha Shrine

多賀大社たがたいしゃ

The deities of Taga Taisha are Izanagi and Izanami — the primordial couple who created the Japanese archipelago, who gave birth to the sun goddess and the moon deity and the sea deity and the storm deity and, accidentally, the fire deity whose birth killed Izanami. They are, in other words, the ultimate ancestors of everything that matters in the Japanese cosmological imagination. The Grand Shrine of Ise, to which every Japanese person has a nominal familial relationship, houses Izanagi's daughter. Taga Taisha houses the parents. Historically, this was understood to carry corresponding weight: a Edo-period folk song enumerated "Seven visits to Ise, three visits to Kumano, monthly visits to Taga" in that order, suggesting that Taga was a destination visited more frequently than either of Japan's most famous sacred sites. The shrine's contemporary relative obscurity — leafy and peaceful, with far fewer visitors than its mythological pedigree should attract — makes it simultaneously a genuine off-the-beaten-path discovery and a mild puzzle about the relationship between a site's intrinsic significance and its popular recognition.