S P O T ／ SPOT-249

Nikita Shrine (Ishigami-san & the Peach-Ball Throwing)

新北神社（石神さん・桃玉）にきたじんじゃ

Nikita Shrine, an ancient shrine in the Morodomi district of Saga City, enshrines Susanoo-no-Mikoto and claims a founding in 586 CE. Its great oddity is the living one: a Chinese juniper said to be roughly 2,200 years old, planted — so legend holds — by Xu Fu, the envoy who sailed to Japan seeking the elixir of immortality and used the tree to mark his landing. The trunk no longer rises; it lunges almost sideways across the earth, propped up on wooden crutches, which is why it is called the "flying-dragon tree." A vermilion placard reading 飛龍木 leans against its base. Beside it stands a 1,600-year-old camphor, and behind the main hall crowds a dense field of small stone shrines, among them a sacred stone known simply as Ishigami-san, "the stone deity." Here the shrine's specialty — purification against all calamity — takes a physical, almost playful form: visitors receive a peach-shaped ball at the shrine office and throw it at the sacred stone to drive off misfortune and fix a wish. The gesture descends from one of Japan's oldest apotropaic images, the Kojiki episode in which the god Izanagi hurls peaches to repel the dead. Giant-tree worship, stone-deity worship, and the magic of the peach all settle into a single precinct, capped each autumn by the acrobatic, three-tier Mie lion dance, a designated prefectural cultural property.