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Yoshino Kumano NP, Wakayama
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On July 14, Nachi’s kami make a ritual return to their original sanctuary at the waterfall: 12 spirits ride 6-metre fan shrines shaped like the cascade, while 12 torches weighing up to 50 kg purify the route.
Many of the festival’s ritual implements are made anew each year, with preparations starting around April. Residents of Ichinono traditionally carry the 12 fan shrines—a procession sustained by local skill and duty.
The three-legged Yatagarasu worshipped at Nachi is also the Japan Football Association’s emblem. Nearby Hamano-miya was birthplace of Nakamura Kakunosuke, a football pioneer whose work helped introduce the sport in Japan.
Local legend says Yatagarasu, after guiding Emperor Jimmu toward Yamato, turned to stone to rest at Nachi. A medieval painting of the shrine already places the crow-stone inside the main sanctuary.
Nachi’s giant omikuji is 133 cm long—one hundredth the 133-m height of the waterfall that inspired it. Even a pull for fortune is scaled to the sacred cascade at the heart of this shrine.
The shrine’s 500-year-old Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala was more than sacred art: Kumano bikuni nuns carried copies around Japan, unrolling the picture as a visual guide so listeners could make an imagined pilgrimage.
The shrine buildings were rebuilt in 1853, yet their layout facing the waterfall is already visible in a painting from 1299. The sacred composition has endured for more than 550 years.
Nachi Dengaku is recorded here by 1403, but its performance tradition broke after the 1868 separation of Buddhism and Shinto. In 1921, preserved notation and elders’ memories helped bring it back.
Nachi Dengaku has 23 pieces and no singers: flute provides the only melody as dancers mime rice planting, tending and harvest, accompanied by the rippling clack of a wooden-board instrument called binzasara.
Nachi’s 6 sanctuaries enshrine 13 deities—one more than the other Kumano Sanzan shrines, because this shrine also honors the waterfall kami. The falls themselves were the original object of worship.
The hollow in Nachi’s 800-year-old sacred camphor is called Tainai Kuguri, or “womb passage”; passing through it is believed to bring good fortune. Local tradition credits the great tree to Taira no Shigemori.
The 32-hectare Nachi Primeval Forest east of the falls has long been protected as shrine sanctuary, with ordinary entry and tree-cutting prohibited. Its evergreen forest shelters plants and animals from both cool and warm climates.
For centuries, Kumano Nachi Taisha and neighboring Seiganto-ji formed one Buddhist-Shinto religious complex. A government order in 1868 formally split them; their side-by-side presence still tells that blended history.
Excavations at sutra mounds below Nachi Falls in 1918 uncovered 12th–13th-century Buddhist relics; the shrine preserves mound offerings such as mirrors, Buddha images and scripture containers.
Nachi’s chief deity, Kumano Fusumi, is linked by the shrine to “musu,” generation and growth, and “musubi,” binding ties. Hence its name Musubi-no-miya: a place for many kinds of wishes, not only romance.
Nachi’s cherry trees have their own stories: its weeping cherry is linked to retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, while “Hidehira Cherry” is said to have been brought from far-off Oshu by warlord Fujiwara no Hidehira and his wife.
Each April 14, Nachi’s Sakura Flower Festival gives thanks for nature and prays for harvest. It recalls Emperor Kazan, who is said to have spent 1,000 days in retreat here and composed a verse about flowers.
Before dawn on New Year’s Day, sacred water is drawn at the falls for Nachi’s crow-marked talisman. Shrine tradition says 2,000 copies were once presented to the imperial court; the New Year printing rite continues.
