Yoshida Shrine

Yoshida Shrine stands beside the ruins of Yoshida Castle on the south bank of the Toyokawa River. It enshrines Susanoo no Mikoto and is known as the birthplace of tezutsu hand-held fireworks.

History

Accounts of the founding vary, but the former priestly family's records place it in 1124, when an epidemic struck the area and Gozu Tenno – a deity associated with warding off plague – was invited here and petitioned to drive the sickness away.

The shrine claims a close association with Minamoto no Yoritomo, who is said to have sent proxies to worship here in 1178 and 1186. That connection survives in the Yoritomo Procession, the centrepiece of the shrine's annual festival.

Once the castle was built, the shrine stood within its grounds and came under the patronage of its lords. Imagawa Yoshimoto, Sakai Tadatsugu, and Ikeda Terumasa all supported it, and Tokugawa Ieyasu granted it thirty koku of land. Every construction and repair of the shrine buildings through the Edo period – two rebuildings and fourteen repairs – was carried out by a castle lord. It took the name Yoshida Shrine in 1869. The present worship hall dates from 1884 and the main hall from 1893, both built with donations from the parish after a typhoon brought a cedar down on the earlier structure. The shrine remains the tutelary shrine of eight parish districts, which together stage the Toyohashi Gion Festival each July.

On the grounds

The stone torii dates from 1746, with a plaque written by the last lord of Yoshida Domain. Near it lies the Yogoseki, a large stone unearthed during a torii rebuilding in 1673; an oracle directed that the stone be left in place and the torii moved instead, and it has been venerated since as a place where a deity may manifest. A monument marking the birthplace of Mikawa's tezutsu fireworks was erected in 1993.

Three subsidiary shrines stand on or near the grounds: the Kinkanmaru Inari Shrine, worshipped for career advancement and protection against misfortune; the Izawa Shrine; and the Susanoo Shrine in Shinhonmachi, founded in 1186, which serves as the resting place for the portable shrine during the July festival and holds its own ring-passing rite on 31 July.

Cultural properties

Between 2021 and 2024, Toyohashi City designated several of the shrine's holdings as cultural properties. Among them are a pair of Kamakura-period wooden lions; a lion head said to have been donated by Imagawa Yoshimoto, which still leads the portable shrine procession facing south; a demon mask also attributed to Yoshimoto; ridge tablets recording the construction and repair of the shrine's portable shrines from 1547 onward, valuable as sources on Yoshida from the Sengoku through the Edo period; and a votive painting of 1890 depicting the festival fireworks and procession as they were in the late Edo years.