Mitake Shrine, Miyamasu

The first actual shrine that I passed walking along the Ōyama Kaidō was Mitake (mee-ta-kay) Shrine, on Miyamasu Hill in Shibuya. This is the main road on the opposite side of the station from the famous junction with the enormous screens that it almost always used as an establishing shot of Tokyo in foreign films. It is, therefore, about as urban as an area can get, and the shrine is squeezed in between two large buildings, one of which is a main post office. As is often the case, there is a flight of stone steps up from the street to the main precincts of the shrine.

There are three things that struck me as unusual about this shrine, but as the shrine office was closed and, in any case, I couldn’t spend too long there if I was going to get to the end of the day’s route, I wasn’t able to check in detail. At some point I may go back, since it isn’t very far away, and try to find out.

You may be able to tell from the photograph of the precincts, but, in addition to being squeezed between buildings, the shrine looks rather as though it is on top of a building; the structures to the side seem to be built into the “ground”, not next to it, and all of the surface is paved. This is surprising because, according to one of the lecturers at Kokugakuin a few years ago, the basic rule of the Association of Shinto Shrines is that a shrine must be “On the earth, under the sky”. A shrine on a building or inside is, as far as the Association is concerned, just a glorified kamidana. So, most shrines are built directly on the ground. Now, Mitake Shrine may be, in fact, on a hill. The bits of the hill to either side could have been carved away to make room for the buildings; that’s fairly common in Japanese cities. On the other hand, it might not be recognised by the Association; there is no law requiring shrines to have such recognition, and, indeed, some very famous ones (Meiji JingÅ«, Fushimi Inari) are not. Either way, the absence of an obvious natural earth surface under foot is unusual.

The second unusual point is the presence of an image of Fudō Myo-ō in the shrine grounds. According to the notice next to it, this image has been worshipped in the area since the late seventeenth century, and it is a Buddhist image. Now, as I have mentioned before, in the late nineteenth century the government required that all Buddhist images be removed from shrines. Unlike Toyokawa Inari, Mitake Shrine is clearly a shrine, which raises the question of why it has a Buddhist image.

One possibility is that it was moved to the shrine after the second world war, as a result of the development of the area around Shibuya station. That sort of thing happens quite a lot; there are a number of religious images noted in the Ōyama Kaidō guidebook as having been moved from their original sites due to building and development.

Another possibility arises from another historical event recorded on a big noticeboard at the shrine. In 1870, the Meiji Emperor made a royal progress from the palace, and on the way out and back he stopped at Mitake Shrine for a rest, paying his respects at the shrine. If the Fudō Myo-ō was near the shrine at that time, and the Emperor paid his respects to it as well, it would be difficult to move it away. So, it might have been just outside the shrine, thus formally within the law, and protected by an imperial association.

Whatever the history, the fact remains that the Buddhist image is now clearly within the shrine precincts, although there is a second torii between the small shrine for the image and the main hall of the shrine. Whether or not this can actually be called Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, given that, as far as I could see, it was just a matter of physical proximity, it is still a reminder of the close links between Shinto and Buddhism.

The final point concerns the koma-inu. Although the name means “Korea Dogs”, these statues normally look nothing like dogs. Rather, they look rather like lions, with curly hair and, occasionally, horns. They stand in a pair in front of the shrine buildings, protecting them from evil influences, one with its mouth open and the other with its mouth closed. At Inari shrines, the koma-inu are almost invariably replaced by foxes, and at Hie shrines they are sometimes replaced by monkeys. In both cases, these are the animals particularly associated with kami in question. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a Tenjin shrine that uses cattle, or a Hachiman shrine that uses doves (the animal associated with the kami of scholarship is the cow, that associated with the kami of war is the dove).

As you can see from the photograph, the koma-inu at this shrine look a lot like dogs, or possibly wolves. “Mitake” refers to a sacred mountain, and wolves used to live in Japan’s mountains, so it is possible that the animals associated with the kami of this shrine are wolves, and that the koma-inu are wolves. Alternatively, since there are no formal rules for how they look, the chief priest of this shrine, or the donor, may just have decided to make them look like dogs. In any case, this is definitely unusual.