S P O T ／ SPOT-352

Udo Jingu (Udo Shrine)

鵜戸神宮うどじんぐう

On the cliffs of the Nichinan coast in Miyazaki, where the Hyuga Sea hammers the rock, the shrine of Udo Jingu does something almost no other shrine in Japan does: it hides. To reach the vermillion main hall you do not climb toward the gods — you descend, down a stone stairway cut into the cliff face, into the mouth of a vast sea cave (38 meters east-to-west, 8.5 meters high) where the lacquered building sits tucked beneath a ceiling of raw rock. This is a 'kudari-miya,' a descending shrine, and the effect is uncanny: the architecture of worship swallowed into the body of the earth. Behind the hall, two breast-shaped protrusions called the 'milk rocks' (ochichi-iwa) drip 'milk water,' and legend holds the shrine's deity — said to be the father of Japan's first emperor — was nursed on candy made from that water. Out on the rocks, pilgrims hurl small clay 'fortune balls' (untama) at a hollow in the Turtle Stone: men with the left hand, women with the right. Cave, breast-rocks, and the strange throwing rite fuse into one of Kyushu's most visually arresting sites of folk belief.