Tokiwadai Tenso Shrine

Tenso Shrine stands in Tokiwadai, Itabashi, Tokyo. It is said to have been founded around the Kamakura period, and in the Edo period it was called Shinmei-sha and was the guardian shrine of Kamiitabashi post town on the Kawagoe road. A place for worshipping Mt. Fuji from afar has been set up in a corner of the precinct, and the Fuji festival (Fuji-sai) is held every year on 21 July. The photos show the festival. A practitioner dressed in white performs rites in front of the worship place, and local parishioners attend.

The members of Edo’s Fuji-kō groups climbed the mountain behind their leaders, wearing white robes with white leggings and gaiters and sedge hats, holding prayer beads and kongō staffs, and chanting the call-and-response prayer “Rokkon shōjō” (purify the six senses).

Itabashi also had Fuji-kō believers from early on. Among the disciples of Jikigyō Miroku was Nagata Chōshirō (religious name Chōshō), described as “a man of Hirao-chō, Itabashi, in Musashi”, and the 1838 (Tenpō 9) pilgrim register of Suyama village records “Matsugorō, carpenter of Itabashi” as a leader from Edo. The Fuji oshi posted notices encouraging climbs in cities and post towns across the country for the kōshin special year, which came round once every sixty years. Among the places listed for the notices issued by the oshi of the Yoshida trail in 1800 (Kansei 12) and 1859 (Ansei 6) is Itabashi on the Nakasendō.

The surrounding villages were also tied to the oshi of the Yoshida trail. At the end of the Edo period the Tanabe family, an oshi house, had Ikebukuro village and other villages as its followers’ districts and also served a Fuji-kō group in Jūjō. After the Meiji Restoration these districts were reorganised into Fuji-kō groups such as those of Ikebukuro and Kanaikubo.