Meoto Iwa

Meoto Iwa is a pair of rocks standing in the sea off Futami in Ise, Mie Prefecture, in front of the Futami Okitama Shrine. The larger, called the husband rock, is 9 metres high; the smaller, the wife rock, is 4. Between them is strung a shimenawa, a rope of rice straw of the kind used to mark off sacred ground, this one 35 metres long.

The rocks are not the object of worship. They stand as a gateway to something else: a rock called Okitama Shinseki, which lies out in the sea beyond them and cannot be seen.

That rock is held to be where the gods first come ashore when they arrive from Tokoyo, the land across the eastern sea, and it is bound up with Sarutahiko, the god of guidance, who is enshrined here. Meoto Iwa is treated as the torii through which it is worshipped from the land, and the rope between them marks the division between the world of the gods and the ordinary world.

The sun rises between the two rocks in May, June and July, and is highest between them at the summer solstice. In clear weather at that season Mount Fuji can be seen far off behind them.

Figures of frogs stand about the shrine grounds in numbers, left there as offerings. Several reasons are given for them. Frogs were offered to the sun god in old usage; the sacred rock is honoured as a guardian spirit of the sea and worshipped together with the dragon deities, who are said to delight in rain, and a frog is a creature of the rain; and pilgrims to Ise offered them in the hope of getting home safely, since kaeru means both a frog and to return.