Komuro Sengen Shrine (Shimomiya Sengen)

Komuro Sengen Shrine, in Shimoyoshida, Fujiyoshida City. Popularly known as Shimomiya Sengen, this is a sanctuary deeply rooted in its locality, having long sustained the everyday life and prayer of Shimoyoshida — the part of Yoshida that serves as the entrance to the Mt. Fuji ascent.

Shrine tradition places the founding in 807 (Daidō 2), and the shrine was anciently called Shimomiya Sengen Myōjin. The principal deity is Konohana-no-Sakuya-bime, the same chief deity of Mt. Fuji enshrined at Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha; here, however, the shrine bears the strong character of a village tutelary tied to the daily life of the locality. Originally it was the ubusunagami — the patron deity of birth — of the three villages of Kamiyoshida, Shimoyoshida, and Matsuyama, but as each village later acquired its own tutelary, it came in practice to serve as the village shrine of Shimoyoshida alone.

In the Edo period, the shrine was held as the tutelary of the neighbouring Gekkō-ji temple under the syncretic system of Shinto-Buddhist fusion; on festival days, monks of the bettō-ji — the affiliated temple — would attend and chant the sutras. During the early Meiji haibutsu kishaku, records survive of vigorous activity by oshi and village officials on the shrine’s side, pressing the boundary disputes with Gekkō-ji and the removal of Buddhist elements.

The most distinctive feature of the shrine is the yabusame mounted-archery ritual held at the September festival. Far from being a mere offering of martial arts, it is a divination rite — a prayer for the realm performed alongside an examination of the year’s fortune through the archery’s outcome. Above all, the pattern of the horses’ hoofprints is read to divine the year’s fire-misfortunes, a uniquely local custom even by national standards. About three ri up the Yoshida trail, near the boundary between the grass mountain and the wooded mountain, lies a place called the Umasu-no-Baba — “the horse ground” — of which the records state that “in olden days, yabusame was performed here at the Sengen festival.” The name preserves the old memory of yabusame as a rite of purification performed on the threshold of the sacred precincts. The ritual was originally conducted with four sacred horses, but after the Meiji Restoration the practice fell into disorder and injuries followed; in 1884 the “Komuro Sengen-sha Ryūme Gijō” — a formal compact — was concluded and the regulations reformed. Two horses now carry on the tradition. Within the grounds stands the sacred-horse stable, where in Edo times wooden images of the sacred horses were enshrined.

Medieval Shimoyoshida already possessed a long record as a receiving station for Fuji pilgrims. Shōshun-an, a branch temple of Gekkō-ji, had lodged Fuji pilgrims since the Ōei era (from the late fourteenth century); its abbots served as innkeepers in the summer climbing season and, from autumn onward, travelled the provinces distributing sacred talismans — activity identical to that of the oshi themselves. In 1496 (Meiō 5), Ashikaga Chachamaru, the Horigoe kubō, is recorded to have lodged at Shōkaku-an in Shimoyoshida before climbing Mt. Fuji. In the Sengoku period, the Oyamada clan, lords of the Gunnai district, governed this land — exempting Gekkō-ji from levies and granting the oshi free passage through the barriers, while in turn imposing military service upon them.

Shimoyoshida, like Kamiyoshida, was an oshi town in its own right; its oshi held vast dannaba — parishes — extending across the Kantō region centred on Edo. Pilgrims of the Fuji-kō would lodge at the oshi inns of Shimoyoshida, worship at this shrine, and then set out for Mt. Fuji. Even when a child was born in Kamiyoshida, the old custom recorded the first shrine visit at one hundred days as taking place first at this Shimomiya — a sign of the shrine’s enduring role within the “upper and lower” pairing of Fuji faith.

The photographs show the prayer hall after rain, and the sacred-horse stable on the grounds. In the figure of the horse standing quietly within the modest wooden building, the twelve-hundred-year story of this shrine breathes on.