Aritoshi Shrine

What Aritoshi Shrine Is

Aritoshi Shrine (蟻通神社, Aritōshi Jinja) stands in the Nagataki district of Izumisano City, Osaka Prefecture, and eleven of the buildings in its precincts were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2015. The enshrined deity is Okuninushi no Mikoto. Shrine tradition places the founding in the reign of the ninth emperor, Kaika, though no record survives to date it. A register of Izumi Province deities compiled in 1289 lists the shrine under a variant writing of the same name, and two medieval estate maps show it as Anatoshisha.

The name is read Aritoshi. The Noh play about the shrine says Aridoshi, and the older poetic form Aritohoshi survives in the title of the torchlit Noh performance held here each year. Local people call the place Aritoshi-san. Before the Meiji period it was also known as Aritoshi Myojin.

Two explanations for the name circulate. One comes from a riddle tale in which a thread is passed through a seven-times-curved jewel by tying it to an ant, ari being the Japanese word for ant. The other links the name to the shrine's old position on the Kumano Highway, where pilgrims walking south in single file were likened to a column of ants.

A Poet, a Sick Horse, and The Pillow Book

The collected poems of Ki no Tsurayuki, a leading poet of the early tenth century, record that his horse collapsed as he rode home from Kii Province. A passer-by told him to pray to the deity of Aritoshi. Tsurayuki composed a verse apologising for having ridden past without knowing the god was there, playing on the syllables of the shrine's name against a phrase about stars invisible behind cloud. The horse recovered.

Sei Shonagon named the same deity in The Pillow Book, in her list of shrines, and set down the tale attached to the name. In the Muromachi period Zeami turned the episode into the Noh play Aridoshi. A pond in the precincts marks the spot where Tsurayuki is said to have dropped his court cap; it was recreated after the shrine moved, and a stone monument of the 1830s stands beside a poem stele erected in 1968.

The Wartime Move That Shaped the Precincts

Nothing about Aritoshi Shrine makes sense without the relocation of 1942. The old precincts lay about a kilometre north of the present site, on the Kumano Highway, with a pine-lined approach and a compound roughly five times the current area. During the Second World War an army airfield attached to the Akeno Army Flying School was laid out across four villages, taking farmland, irrigation ponds and part of the settlement with it. The shrine had to go.

Parishioners did the work themselves. Most of the buildings were moved whole by the hikiya method, hauled on rollers over about a week rather than dismantled. Young men had already left for the front, and the records describe the effort as gruelling. The transfer of the deity was completed in August 1944, a year before the war ended.

The new compound is smaller, but the north-south axis of main hall, worship hall, dance hall and front gate was rebuilt exactly as it had been. That is why eleven registered buildings survive together here rather than scattered or lost.

Walking the Precincts

The grounds of Aritoshi Shrine run north to south and are entered from the south. Stone lanterns line the southern approach off the prefectural road, and a stone arched bridge crosses a pond in front of the vermilion front gate. Beyond the gate the dance hall stands on the axis, then the long low worship hall with its offering hall behind, then an open corridor, and finally the main hall facing south at the northern end. A rear gate and openwork fences enclose the main hall from behind.

A purification pavilion sits beside the southern approach; the votive tablet hall is in the southeast corner. A second gate, the back gate, opens on the northwest with another purification pavilion next to it. Small subsidiary shrines cluster east and northeast of the dance hall, among them one for the feet and legs and one dedicated to Benzaiten. Thirty minutes is enough to see everything. Ten of the eleven registered properties are buildings; the eleventh is the bridge.

Eleven Properties, Three Periods

All eleven properties at Aritoshi Shrine were listed together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 August 2015, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. Their registration numbers run in an unbroken sequence. They divide into three groups by date.

The oldest are the dance hall, from the early Edo period, and the main hall of 1669, both associated with the Okabe lords of Kishiwada Domain. A second group belongs to the last decades of the Edo period and the years just before the move: the front gate of 1852, the back gate of 1853, the votive tablet hall of 1861, and the worship hall, the north purification pavilion and the arched bridge, all of the late Edo period, followed by the south purification pavilion of 1940. The third group was built for the new site in 1942, when the open corridor and the rear gate with its fences were put up. Buildings carried from the old precincts and buildings made for the new one now stand side by side.

Festivals and Noh on the Dance Hall

The event Aritoshi Shrine is best known for is the Aritohoshi Takigi Noh, a torchlit performance begun in 2014 by local volunteers to mark seventy years since the move. The shrine's dance hall serves as the stage, and a Kanze school actor leads a programme of Noh and kyogen in the open air. The play Aridoshi itself has been staged in some years. The date shifts, so check the shrine's site before planning around it. Classes for local schoolchildren run alongside the performance.

The ordinary calendar opens with New Year's Day, followed by the Toka Ebisu festival of 9 to 11 January, the Setsubun rite in February, a spring prayer for the harvest on the second Sunday of April, a rice-planting thanksgiving in late June, the autumn festival in October, a fire festival on 3 November, the harvest thanksgiving on the first Sunday of December, and the purification rite of 31 December. In the Edo period the shrine was one of the principal places in southern Izumi where rain was prayed for, and successive lords of Kishiwada Domain endowed it with treasures and land.

Visiting

The precincts of Aritoshi Shrine are open and free of charge. None of the buildings can be entered, so the eleven registered properties are seen from the outside. Photography in the grounds is unrestricted, though it is polite to stop while a rite is under way. The floorboards of the dance hall were replaced in 2024 through a crowdfunding campaign, and stepping onto it in shoes is not permitted.

By train, Nagataki Station on the JR Hanwa Line is the nearest stop, about ten minutes on foot. By bus, take the Izumisano community bus southern loop from Nankai Izumisano Station or JR Hineno Station and get off at Aritoshi Jinja-mae, which puts you at the gate. Drivers have a free car park with space for about twenty vehicles. Kansai International Airport is close by.

Goshuin seals, amulets and prayer services are handled at the shrine office, which is not always staffed. For anything scheduled, telephone 072-465-0897 in advance. The address is 814 Nagataki, Izumisano City.