Fuji Grand Priest Mausoleum of Sengen Taisha

In Motoshiro-chō, Fujinomiya, near the former site of the temple Hōshaku-ji, lies the okutsuki (burial ground) of the Fuji family of Grand Priests, who held the hereditary priesthood of Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha from antiquity until the Meiji era.

The Fuji clan claimed descent from the Wanibe lineage, tracing its ancestry to Emperor Kōshō. According to the family genealogy, the line began in 795 (Enryaku 14), when Wanibe no Omi Toyomaro was appointed district governor of Fuji and, six years later, took charge of the worship of Asama no Ōkami. The family emerges clearly into the documentary record from the fourteenth century, with the twenty-first head, Fuji Naotoki. It was from Naotoki’s generation that the title of Grand Priest (daigūji) was formally assumed and the family name of Fuji took root.

In the medieval period the family grew into something more than a priestly house: lords of Ōmiya Castle, they took on the character of warrior magnates rooted in the land. The last heads of the Sengoku age, Fuji Nobutada (Hyōbu no Shō) and his son Nobumichi (Kurōdo), served as leading vassals of the Imagawa of Suruga. When Takeda Shingen invaded the province, they shut themselves in Ōmiya Castle and resisted fiercely, yielding the fortress only through the mediation of the Hōjō. In the medieval period the Fuji family were priests who conducted the shrine’s rites and, at the same time, warriors who held a castle and fought.

The office of Grand Priest passed down through the generations until the abolition of hereditary priesthood in 1871 (Meiji 4) brought the succession to a close.

The spirits of the successive Grand Priests and of the shrine’s priestly households are venerated here.