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Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Nagano
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The dragon above Chūsha’s worship hall is a remarkable comeback: Kawanabe Kyōsai’s original burned in 1942, so a restoration team recreated its image in 2003 from a single black-and-white postcard measuring just 9 × 14 cm.
Every 3 years, Chūsha’s Hashiramatsu rite burns 3 bamboo-and-wood towers to read the coming harvest and public fortunes. A 1299 record already mentions a dispute over how the fire ceremony should be performed.
Chūsha’s autumn soba offering starts months before the ceremony: local noodle makers sow the buckwheat in July and hand-harvest it in October. At the shrine, 3 white-robed artisans knead, roll and cut the new soba.
Chūsha’s 3 giant cedars stand about 72 m apart at the corners of an almost equilateral triangle around the great torii. Their trunks measure up to 9.9 m around, and the trees are a Nagano City natural monument.
Chūsha enshrines Omoikane, the strategist in the Ama-no-Iwato myth who devised the song and dance that drew sun goddess Amaterasu from her cave. The shrine’s Daidai Kagura preserves 10 dances, including one about opening the cave.
Local history traces Togakushi soba to buckwheat carried by mountain ascetics as portable food. Noodles came later: records show soba-kiri served at ceremonies by 1709, before the dish became a treat for visiting pilgrims.
In a local legend, a fisherman’s children eat mermaid flesh and begin growing scales. A dream sends their father to Togakushi to plant 3 cedars in a triangle—the trees now known as Chūsha’s Sanbon-sugi.
Before it was today’s shrine, Chūsha was Nakain, a Tendai Buddhist precinct traditionally dated to around 1087. Its pilgrim-lodging neighborhood became part of Japan’s first nationally selected preservation district centered on shukubo in 2017.
Mid-20th-century Chūsha was also a bamboo-craft village: about 100 of its 150 households worked with nemagari-dake bamboo. Records from the early 1960s count 30,000 winnowing trays made in a year.
