S P O T ／ SPOT-253

Itosaki Shrine

糸碕神社いとさきじんじゃ

Founded, by tradition, in the year 729, Itosaki Shrine is one of Hiroshima's oldest, set in the Inland Sea port town of Itozaki. Its legend reaches back into Japan's myth-history: Empress Jingu is said to have moored her warships in the bay here and drawn water from a well, and that well — the Mitsugi-i — is held to be the origin of both the old district name 'Mitsugi' and, through 'Idozaki' (well cape), the place name 'Itozaki' itself. The shrine's founding story thus quietly named the land around it. But the unmissable presence in the precinct is the great camphor: roughly 30 meters tall, some 13 meters around at chest height, and estimated at about 500 years old, it is reckoned the largest camphor in Hiroshima Prefecture and the third largest in the entire Chugoku-Shikoku region. Designated a Natural Monument in 1962, the tree stands beside the worship hall like a living monument, its canopy dwarfing the architecture and rooting centuries of legend, sacred-tree worship, and place-name origin in a single shaded courtyard.