A meizanologist's diary (64)

24 March: on our way to visit friends in Ogikubo, a Tokyo suburb, we drop into the local Hakusan shrine – the actual Hakusan, some 360 kilometres away in Ishikawa Prefecture, is the Sensei’s local Meizan, and therefore your correspondent’s mountain-in-law. As an additional incentive, from a previous visit I remember a small flock of cats a-prowling in the shrine’s grounds.

A notice by the entrance tells us that the shrine venerates the goddess Izanagi and that it dates back to the Bunmei period (1469-1487), when a certain Nakada Kaga no Kami built a shrine here. Legend has it that, when Nakada’s younger brother was suffering from a severe toothache, the Hakusan oracle appeared to him in a dream and advised him to eat with chopsticks made of bush clover twigs. And lo, when he did so, the toothache was cured.

We walk up a long stone path shaded by tall trees and come out into a spacious courtyard. As it’s a Sunday, the shrine is quietly busy, with visitors coming and going every few minutes to pay their respects. Strange to say, when this main sanctuary was renovated in 1967, a pile of bush clover chopsticks was discovered under the old building, presumably brought there as offerings by supplicants hoping to be cured of their toothaches.

But where are the cats that I’d promised the Sensei? Not one is to be seen. Instead, two fine felines of polished stone have materialised – at least, I don’t remember seeing them previously – one attending the shrine’s lustral basin (“temizuya”) and the other asleep on a wall. The mystery of the missing cats deepens …

When you come to think about it, though, the real mystery is not the lack of cats but the proliferation of Hakusan shrines. For every prefecture has at least one, excepting Okinawa and possibly Hokkaido, and there are some 2,700 to 3,000 nationwide, estimates varying by date and source. In any case, they far outnumber shrines dedicated to Sengen, the goddess of Mt Fuji. Now there would be a mystery to investigate…