Tagata Shrine

About

Tagata Jinja stands in Komaki City in Aichi Prefecture, near Nagoya, and is among the venerable rural shrines of the central Honshu plain. Its origins are lost in antiquity, but tradition holds that the sanctuary has stood here for more than fifteen hundred years, and it appears in the tenth-century Engishiki Jinmyōchō as a Myōjin Taisha.

The kami enshrined at Tagata are Mitoshi no Kami and the female deity Tamahime no Mikoto. Mitoshi is the son of the great agricultural kami Ōtoshi, grandson of Susanoo, and embodies the blessings of the harvest year. Tamahime is honoured as a princess of the Owari clan who returned to this region after her husband's death and laboured for the cultivation of the land.

The shrine is most widely known for the annual Hōnensai, the Harvest Festival, held on the fifteenth of March. The word hōnen means a prosperous year, and the rite celebrates the fertility of fields, families and all living things through processions and the carrying of carved wooden mikoshi.

A companion observance is kept at the nearby Ōagata Shrine the Sunday before, with complementary imagery of female generative power, so that the two shrines together honour the union from which all harvest and life proceed. Tagata's rites preserve a pre-modern agricultural Shinto sensibility that has weathered the changes of urban Japan with remarkable vitality.

History

Tagata Shrine is believed by tradition to be more than fifteen centuries old, and it is recorded in the early tenth-century Engishiki as one of the Myōjin Taisha sanctuaries of the realm. The Hōnensai has been kept since ancient times to invoke the blessings of the harvest and the fertility of human and animal life, joining Tagata with the wider cluster of fertility shrines of the central Japanese countryside. Through the modern era the shrine has remained a focus of local agricultural identity, and the Hōnensai today gathers worshippers from across Japan as well as visitors from abroad.

Significance

Tagata Shrine preserves one of the most ancient and uninterrupted expressions of agricultural Shinto in Japan, in which the generative powers of nature and human life are honoured together as the gift of the kami. The shrine continues to gather the local community for the rites of the harvest year and remains a place of reverence for the deep continuities of Shinto practice.