S P O T ／ SPOT-326

Mitsumine Shrine

三峯神社みつみねじんじゃ

At 1,100 meters in the deep mountains of Chichibu stands a shrine guarded not by lion-dogs but by wolves. Mitsumine Shrine, one of the three great shrines of Chichibu, traces its founding to the legendary hero Yamato Takeru, who is said to have enshrined the creator deities Izanagi and Izanami here during his eastern campaign, guided up the mountain by a wolf that was then enshrined alongside them as a divine messenger. From that legend grew the shrine's defining feature: the worship of the wolf, or 'Oinu-sama,' whose stone statues stand watch throughout the precincts where guardian dogs would normally sit, and flank the shrine's rare triple torii gate. Once the Chichibu mountains were home to real Japanese wolves, and their protective power was invoked against boar and deer in the fields and against fire and thieves in the towns of Edo. That belief survives in a living ritual called go-kenzoku haishaku, in which worshippers 'borrow' a wolf, with its paper talisman, to guard their home for a year before returning it. Perched in misty highland forest, Mitsumine remains the spiritual heartland of Japan's wolf faith.