4 - Ise Jingu and Toshogu

After declining significantly in the late Middle Ages, support for Jingu from the warrior regime is said to have revived during the 16^th century Warring States period. Major military figures such as Uesugi Kenshin, Takeda Shingen, Oda Nobunaga worked to support the shrine in place of the failing Ashikaga shogunate. Those samurai houses’ joint efforts culminated in the Tokugawa shoguns’ policy of taking the shrine under their official protection.

One delicate issue presented itself, though. With Jingu being a state ancestral shrine dedicated to the ancestral deity of the Imperial House, the relationship between the new Tokugawa rulers and Toshogu Shrine, which enshrined their ancestral deity (the divinity worshipped at Toshogu is Tosho Daigongen, the deified Ieyasu Tokugawa), was brought into question. Ieyasu’s grandson, Tokugawa Iemitsu, addressed this issue. In the temporal sphere, he had become family to the Imperial House by marriage. With regard to the world of divinities, he aspired to a union of the ancestral deities of the Imperial and Tokugawa houses and achieved a degree of success in that endeavor.

It might seem that the Ise and Toshogu shrines together constituted Japan’s state ancestral shrines throughout the early modern period. However, contemporary opinions varied. Based on approaches evident at the time and the ideas of intellectuals such as Yoshimi Yukikazu and Motoori Norinaga, I this presentation offers a systematic overview of the ways in which people in the early modern period thought about the connections and opposition between the two shrines.