For most of Japan, the seventh lunar month — October — is Kannazuki, “the month without gods.” The eight million kami of the archipelago all gather elsewhere, and the country waits.
The exception is here. In Izumo, October is Kamiarizuki — “the month with gods.” Every shrine in Japan empties out and Izumo Taisha fills up. Eight million kami arrive on the coastline at Inasa-no-Hama, walk inland a few hundred metres, and lodge at the great shrine for a week. They discuss marriages and harvests. Then they go home.
This is the place that requires all the others to be empty.
The handover
The shrine exists because of a deal. In the Kojiki, after the heavenly gods decide to claim the earthly world they had not yet taken, they send the thunder god Takemikazuchi down to the beach at Inasa-no-Hama. He plants his sword tip-first in the sand and asks the lord of Izumo, Okuninushi, to hand over the country.
Okuninushi negotiates. He will give up the visible world — political authority, the affairs of human governance — if the heavens will let him keep what cannot be seen: ritual, prayer, the world of the unseen. And he asks for one more thing. A great hall, the largest in the realm, where he can reside in dignity for as long as the country lasts.
The heavens agree. The hall is built. The country is handed over. The visible world becomes Yamato; the invisible world stays in Izumo. That arrangement, the Kojiki tells us, holds to this day.
The hall
The current honden at Izumo Taisha rises 24 metres. The Heian-era records describe an older version reaching 48 metres — a wooden tower as tall as a sixteen-storey building, the largest building in the country. Some historical sources push the original even higher, to ninety-six metres, though most scholars consider this poetic exaggeration. In 2000, the foundations of a great pillar — three cedar trunks bound together as a single column 1.4 metres across — were excavated on the grounds, confirming that the 48-metre version did, in fact, exist.
You cannot enter the honden. Almost no one can. The grand hall is gated and reserved. What you see when you approach is the great shimenawa — a sacred rope of woven rice straw, five tonnes of it, the largest in Japan — hanging across the front of the Kaguraden, the auxiliary worship hall. People stand beneath it and throw coins upward into its underside. Coins that lodge in the rope, by tradition, mean good fortune.
The four claps
At every other shrine in Japan, the rite of worship is: bow twice, clap twice, bow once. At Izumo Taisha, the rite is: bow twice, clap four times, bow once. Two extra claps. The reason is unclear; tradition holds that it is to honour Okuninushi and his wife, or to mark the unusual scale of the gods worshipped here.
Whatever the explanation, the gesture is its own kind of marker. You arrive at the shrine and immediately do something different. You are in a place where the standard rules of Japanese worship adjust themselves to fit a different scale.
Editor’s note
Visit Izumo Taisha in the late afternoon if you can. The honden faces west, and as the light declines through the cedars surrounding the shrine, the whole site takes on a smoke-grey colour that no photograph captures. The gods, by tradition, do not all live here all year — but the building does. Walk slowly. The country, the Kojiki says, was handed over here. Some of it still is.