Ise and Izumo: Two Shrines, Two Lineages

At this point, readers may wonder why the most famous shrine in Japan—Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture—is not among them. In fact, hereditary succession at Ise Jingu was abolished, and in the early modern era the office of high priest was filled by figures who had no ties to the land, and indeed no ties to Shinto at all.

In fact, the very first place the Meiji government intervened was Ise Jingu. Its aim was to destroy the traditional character of shrines and institutionalize them in a form that would serve the building of a modern nation-state.

From a closed dimension of faith—enshrining the deity native to a particular locality and watching over the people who lived on that land—shrines were thus quietly converted into instruments of devotion to a single unified state. Chosen to stand at the apex of this structure was Ise Jingu: a thoroughly political shrine, selected by bureaucrats.

The story begins in 1872, four years after the new government took power, as bureaucrats were assembling the machinery of the modern state. Outraged that the government was willing to trample the very core of Japanese spiritual belief, Takatomi was appointed chief priest (guji, 宮司) of Izumo Taisha in 1872 at the age of only twenty-six.

Convinced that allowing the government’s transgressions to pass unchecked would destroy the future of Japanese faith, Takatomi took a post in the government and engaged directly in religious administration, even while fiercely safeguarding the rituals of Izumo Taisha. But this double role inevitably provoked those in power, and he was soon driven into a corner. That turning point came with the saijin ronso (祭神論争)—the Pantheon Dispute of 1875—an event that would reshape his life.

The Pantheon Dispute was a bitter conflict within the Shinto Affairs Bureau, the unified missionary body established by the Meiji government, over which deities should be enshrined as supreme. The bureau planned to venerate four kami: the three primordial creator gods who appear at the opening of Kojiki and Nihon Shoki—Amenominakanushi, Takamimusuhi, and Kamumusuhi—together with Amaterasu, the imperial ancestor. Takatomi insisted vehemently that Okuninushi of Izumo Taisha be included among them. His chief adversary was Yoritsune Tanaka (1836–1897) of Ise Jingu.

This dispute may sound arcane to modern readers, but at its heart lay Tanaka’s obsession with a formula that equated imperial veneration with the worship of Amaterasu alone. On mythological grounds—drawing on the myth of kuniyuzuri (国譲り), the yielding of the land—he refused to allow Okuninushi a place in the bureau’s sanctuary. The Shinto world split into two warring camps: the Izumo faction, which backed Takatomi, and the Ise faction, which stood with Tanaka. The clash expanded nationwide, engulfing virtually every Shinto priest in the country and setting the course for the modern history of Shinto as a religion.

The conflict, in short, was between an Ise faction under Tanaka intent on installing the centralized Ise Jingu system, and an Izumo faction under Takatomi that insisted Japan's gods could not be reduced to Amaterasu alone. For Tanaka, Takatomi—the hereditary Izumo governor whose family had evaded the ban on succession—was someone who could never be accommodated. In my view, Tanaka’s Ise faction represented bureaucratic priests eager to secure the vast financial and political spoils of a centralized system, while Takatomi’s Izumo faction represented an ancient clan tradition arguing that sacred worship could never be reduced to modern vested interests.

Yet this very dispute crystallized the division between two fundamentally different conceptions: a Shinto envisioned by the Ise faction as a state religion, and a Shinto championed by the Izumo faction as a place-rooted faith to be passed down through generations. The concept of Shinto split in two at that moment, and the confusion lingers today whenever the term is treated as a single, uniform tradition. From then on, driven by the unchecked dominance of the Ise faction, the apparatus of State Shinto took firm shape.

Even in such an age, a few strong shrines had the standing to refuse what the government demanded. Izumo Taisha stood first among them. Its clan survived the ban on hereditary succession, and in keeping with customs from antiquity, one particular family still serves as chief priest by inheritance.

That a handful of shrines resisted Meiji pressure and have kept their hereditary succession tells us how strong and resilient the faith of the Japanese once was. So what is the origin of Izumo Taisha, a shrine with such power of faith? Regrettably, it is almost never discussed. Here I want to unravel it from my own perspective, built on the research I have done, by crossing myth with ancient history.