Shimane and the Land Where the Gods Gather

In most of Japan the tenth month of the old lunar calendar is Kannazuki, the month without gods. In one small corner of Shimane Prefecture it is Kamiarizuki, the month with gods. Both names are describing the same event from opposite ends: the yaoyorozu no kami, the eight million deities who live in the shrines and rocks and rivers of the archipelago, leave their posts once a year and travel to Izumo Taisha, on the Sea of Japan coast, to hold a meeting.

Nobody claims to have seen this. That is not the point. The point is that a whole country has agreed, for well over a thousand years, that this is where the gods go when they go somewhere — and that Izumo, accordingly, is a place unlike the rest.

The far side of Japan

Shimane is on the coast that faces the continent, not the Pacific, and it is one of the least visited prefectures in the country. There is no bullet train. From Tokyo it is a flight, or a train to Okayama and then a slow one over the mountains that takes most of three hours. The population is small and ageing, the towns are quiet, and the sea is a darker, colder grey than the water most visitors see.

That remoteness is not new. In the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century chronicles that set down Japan's founding myths, Izumo is the other centre of the world — the realm ruled by Ōkuninushi, the god who built the land and then, in the myth's central drama, ceded it to the descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the ancestors of the imperial line. In return he was given Izumo Taisha, a shrine so tall that in its earliest form it is said to have stood forty-eight metres above the ground on enormous pillars. The gods of Amaterasu's line took the visible world. Ōkuninushi took the unseen one: the realm of spirits, of fate, of the bonds between people.

That last domain is why Izumo is the shrine of en-musubi, the tying of en — the karmic threads that connect one person to another. And it is why, when the gods meet each year, the agenda is believed to be this: who will meet whom. Marriages, friendships, the encounters of the coming year, decided at a divine conference on the coast of Shimane.

The shrine

Izumo Taisha does not look like other shrines. The main hall, rebuilt in 1744, is a steep, dark, almost fortress-like structure in a style called taisha-zukuri, thought to be the oldest form of shrine architecture in Japan. Its roof rises like a ship's prow. In front of the worship hall hangs a shimenawa, a sacred straw rope, that weighs several tonnes — the largest in the country. Visitors stand beneath it and feel small, which seems intended.

The etiquette is different here too. At almost every shrine in Japan you clap twice. At Izumo you clap four times — twice for yourself and twice, some say, for the person you hope to be tied to.

Along the sides of the inner compound run two long, low buildings with nineteen doors each, the Jūkusha. They are empty for eleven months. In Kamiarizuki they are the lodgings of the visiting gods.

The welcoming

The gods arrive by sea.

On the evening of the tenth day of the tenth lunar month — a date that falls in November on the modern calendar — priests walk from the shrine to Inasa-no-hama, the beach a kilometre away, and hold a ceremony in the dark at the water's edge. A small fire burns. The sea is usually rough at that time of year. A sacred rope is stretched, chants are sung, and then the gods, having crossed the water, are escorted in procession back to the shrine, shielded from view by white cloth, while the townspeople line the road in silence. Cameras are discouraged. The streets are kept quiet for the week that follows, so that the meeting can proceed without disturbance.

I stood on that beach once in a wind that took the sound out of the chanting and threw it inland. There was nothing to see except the fire and the priests' pale robes and the dim white breakers. It was one of the most convincing religious experiences I have had, and I do not believe any of it, and the two facts did not seem to be in tension.

What the myth is really for

It is tempting to treat Kamiarizuki as a charming folk story, and it is one. But it also does something structural that is worth noticing.

A world of eight million gods, scattered in every rock and tree, has a problem: it is fragmentary. Every valley has its own kami, every household its own hearth god, and nothing connects them. The Izumo gathering is the connection. Once a year the fragments come together in one place and agree on the shape of the coming year. It turns a chaos of local spirits into a single, if very loose, community.

And it gives the kami a job that is recognisably about people. They do not gather to decide the weather or the harvest. They gather to decide who will meet. In a country whose foundational myths are elsewhere about power and lineage and the descent of emperors, this is a strikingly human agenda — the gods of Izumo are, in effect, a divine matchmaking committee, and the millions of ordinary people who visit every year to pray for a good marriage or a good friend are asking them to do their job.

Around the shrine

Shimane rewards slowness, and the shrine is only the centre of a wider place.

The Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo, beside the shrine, holds the enormous bronze swords and bells excavated from nearby sites in the 1980s and 1990s — hundreds of them, buried in rows in the fourth century BCE for reasons nobody has explained. They rewrote the archaeology of the region and gave the Izumo myths, for the first time, a material weight.

Half an hour east is Matsue, the prefectural capital, a castle town on a lake where the writer Lafcadio Hearn lived in 1890 and wrote the essays that introduced Japan's spirit world to English readers. His house is preserved, and the lake at sunset, with Yomegashima island silhouetted against it, is the image that most often stands for Shimane.

Further along the coast, the silver mines of Iwami Ginzan, which once supplied a third of the world's silver, are a World Heritage site of moss and stone and quiet.

And there is the soba. Izumo soba is served in stacked lacquered dishes, three or five to a set, with a dark, strong dipping sauce poured over the noodles rather than the other way round. It is eaten in the small shops along the approach to the shrine, and it is the taste that stays.

Leaving

You come to Izumo, most people, for a reason — a wish about a person. You clap four times, you buy a small charm, you eat the soba, and you take the slow train back over the mountains. Whether the gods heard you is not something the place will confirm.

What it will confirm is this: for a week each November, one town on a grey coast holds its breath so that something invisible can happen in peace. That in itself is a kind of en, a bond — between a place and an idea, kept for a thousand years. It is worth the slow train to see.