Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine
Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Shrine stands at the start of the Yoshida trail up Mt. Fuji. According to tradition, it began when Yamato Takeru, during his eastern campaign, built a small shrine at Ōtsuka-oka, the spot from which he had worshipped Mt. Fuji from afar, and a shrine building was put up at the present site in 788 (Enryaku 7). The first record that can be confirmed in historical documents is the building of a torii in 1480 (Bunmei 12).
The precinct was once the Suwa forest. The Suwa deity enshrined here was long revered as the guardian deity of the land of Yoshida, and as Fuji worship grew, the Sengen shrine came to prosper instead. The Yoshida Fire Festival (Chinka Taisai) on 26 and 27 August was also originally a festival of the Suwa shrine, which became linked with the belief in calming the fires of Fuji. On the festival day, takematsu, torches about three metres tall built in the shape of bamboo shoots, line the town’s streets and are lit together at dusk. The Sengen shrine’s portable shrine, Myōjin-san, and the Suwa shrine’s portable shrine in the shape of Mt. Fuji, Oyama-san (Mikage), are carried through the town, and the festival marks the end of the summer climbing season. It is counted as one of Japan’s three unusual festivals.
The present main hall was rebuilt in 1623 (Genna 9) by Torii Naritsugu, lord of the Gunnai domain in Kai. From 1733 (Kyōhō 18) to 1738 (Genbun 3), Murakami Kōsei, a Fuji-kō leader, spent his own fortune repairing the main hall and the worship hall and adding an offering hall, the Zuishin gate and a kagura hall. The main hall, a one-bay irimoya structure lacquered and brightly coloured with fine carvings, is designated an Important Cultural Property. After the lord’s rebuilding, it was a single Fuji-kō leader who gave the shrine buildings their grand present form, which shows how much ordinary people contributed to Fuji worship in the Edo period.
The shrine flourished in the Edo period, when the Fuji-kō spread across the Kantō region. According to records from the Bunka era (the early 1800s), about 8,000 people a year climbed from the Yoshida side, roughly as many as the three trails on the Suruga side combined. Along the street in front of the shrine lived the oshi, families who ran lodgings for pilgrims generation after generation. Each oshi had districts of their own in the Kantō region, called dannaba, and in the farming off-season they toured them, handing out talismans to members (danna-mawari). One record says that the Ozawa family, a leading oshi house, alone served more than 16,000 danna households.
The great torii at the entrance has a custom of its own: it is rebuilt every sixty years, in the year of kōshin. The plaque on it reading “Sangoku Daiichi-san” (the First Mountain of the Three Countries) was donated by the Akimoto family, lords of Yamura castle. Pilgrims dressed in white passed through this torii to begin the long walk to the summit. It was a shrine gate and, at the same time, the entrance to Mt. Fuji.
Yoshida’s prosperity was bound up with a dispute with Ōmiya in Suruga (Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha). A shogunate ruling in 1779 (An’ei 8) set everything above the eighth station of Mt. Fuji as Ōmiya’s shrine land. Even so, the Yoshida trail drew more climbers than Ōmiya. Ōmiya ruled under the system while the Yoshida side held the economic power, and this tangled relationship continued afterwards.
Beyond the approach lined with giant cedars stand shrine buildings in the ornate Momoyama style, and the Yoshida trail starts beside the main hall. In 2013 the shrine was inscribed as a component of the World Heritage property Fujisan: Sacred Place and Source of Artistic Inspiration.
