S P O T ／ SPOT-315

Ohana Daigongen (Rinkaji Temple)

お花大権現（林下寺）おはなだいごんげん（りんげじ）

Officially Rinkaji is a respectable Shingon Buddhist temple in rural Tokushima, enshrining Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and serving as the 10th stop on a regional Kannon pilgrimage. But almost nobody calls it that. It is known instead as 'Ohana-san' or Ohana Daigongen — and its main hall is piled high with countless carved wooden phalluses, a mountain of votive offerings surrounding the white standing figure of Ohana herself. The legend is part ghost story, part fertility cult: in the late Edo period, Ohana was a beautiful, gifted woman serving a chief retainer of Tsuyama domain in Okayama. The lord's favor toward her enraged his principal wife, who had Ohana murdered. Ohana's spirit then returned with a bargain — enshrine me as a deity, and I will heal 'the illnesses below the waist' for all people. So she became a god of sex, and grateful believers have answered ever since with phallic offerings, building the hall's astonishing accumulation. The result is one of western Japan's foremost sex-worship shrines, prayed to for matchmaking, marital harmony, conception, safe birth, and relief from venereal and women's diseases. It is also a quietly fascinating overlap of two Japanese folk traditions: phallic fertility worship layered onto goryo belief, in which a wronged woman who died violently is enshrined and appeased as a powerful god.