In the Higashi-Takasu district of Asahikawa stands Kokoku Shrine, or Kōkoku Jinja, a Shinto shrine whose history is inseparable from the agricultural settlement of northern Hokkaido during the Meiji period. Today the shrine is dedicated to Ōkuninushi-no-Kami and Matsudaira Naomasa, but its origins lie not in the center of an old castle town or beside an ancient pilgrimage road. Instead, Kokoku Shrine developed within a large agricultural estate known as Matsudaira Farm, established in the 1890s as Hokkaido was being transformed through government-sponsored settlement, land distribution, and agricultural development.
The history of the shrine therefore begins with the history of the farm. Count Matsudaira Naoaki, a descendant of the Matsudaira lords of Matsue, established Matsudaira Farm in the former Takasu Village of Kamikawa District. The official history maintained by the Hokkaido Shrine Association dates the establishment of the farm and the enshrinement of its guardian deities to 1894. Asahikawa City’s historical chronology, however, dates the predecessor Matsue, or Izumo, Shrine to 1895. Both accounts agree on the central relationship between the Matsudaira estate and the religious institution that eventually became Kokoku Shrine.
The difference between 1894 and 1895 should not simply be dismissed as an error. The surviving records may be preserving different stages in the creation of the religious site, such as the establishment of the farm, the initial enshrinement of its tutelary deities, and the organization of a recognizable shrine. The surviving Shrine Detailed Register, or Jinja Meisaichō, along with the records of Matsudaira Farm, offers the best opportunity for settling that question more precisely.
Matsudaira Farm and the Creation of a Guardian Shrine
Matsudaira Farm belonged to the broader transformation of Hokkaido during the Meiji period. Government policies opened large areas to agricultural settlement, while aristocratic families, companies, individual entrepreneurs, and groups of migrants established farms throughout the island. Records connected to the Hokkaido National Uncultivated Land Disposal system document the administrative framework within which enterprises such as Matsudaira Farm were created.
The farm itself quickly became more than a piece of property. It was a community in which managers, tenant farmers, laborers, and their families attempted to make permanent lives in northern Hokkaido. Historical photographs preserved through Asahikawa and Hokkaido collections show the developing agricultural landscape, including the Matsudaira Farm office, tenant houses, irrigation works, rice fields, drainage canals, and other features of the settlement. One photograph from the Meiji 30s, roughly the period from 1897 to 1906, shows a tenant household beside an irrigation ditch on Matsudaira Farm, providing a visual reminder that the shrine’s history unfolded within a working agricultural community rather than in isolation.
Religion was part of that community from its earliest years. The Matsudaira Nōjō Yōran, or Matsudaira Farm Guide, is especially important because the surviving description of the work includes a section titled “The Farm’s Guardian Tutelary Shrine.” The language is significant. The shrine was understood as a chinju-sha, a tutelary shrine connected to the protection and identity of the agricultural estate itself.
Count Matsudaira Naoaki brought religious traditions associated with his family’s former domain into the new settlement. According to the official shrine history, deities associated with Izumo Taisha and Matsue Shrine were invited and enshrined as guardians of Matsudaira Farm. In this way, a religious connection was created between the Matsudaira family’s historical home in Izumo and a new agricultural settlement hundreds of miles to the north.
Ōkuninushi and Matsudaira Naomasa
The two deities presently identified with Kokoku Shrine preserve that connection particularly clearly. The first is Ōkuninushi-no-Kami, one of the central kami associated with Izumo and the principal deity of Izumo Taisha. The second is Matsudaira Naomasa, the seventeenth-century warrior who became the first lord of Matsue from the Matsudaira family.
Naomasa was born in 1601 as a son of Yūki Hideyasu and a grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu. He fought as a teenager during the Osaka campaigns and eventually became lord of Matsue, establishing the Matsudaira line that ruled the domain for generations. Matsue History Museum identifies him as the first Matsue lord of the Matsudaira family and places his rule at the foundation of the family’s long connection to the region.
His presence as a kami at Kokoku Shrine makes the site especially interesting within the study of Japanese religion. Historian Takano Nobuharu’s research into the deification of warriors includes Kokoku Shrine among examples in which former warriors and lords became objects of religious veneration. At Kokoku Shrine, Matsudaira Naomasa was not merely remembered as an ancestor. His memory became incorporated into the sacred order of a new community created by one of his descendants.
The result was a shrine that joined several layers of identity. Ōkuninushi connected the settlement to the religious world of Izumo. Matsudaira Naomasa connected it to the history of the Matsue Matsudaira family. Matsudaira Naoaki’s farm connected both traditions to the agricultural settlement of Hokkaido. What might otherwise have been a distant and unfamiliar landscape could therefore be given a religious identity rooted in traditions brought north by the estate’s founders.
Settlers from Toyama and Life Around the Shrine
The Matsudaira family was only one part of the community that developed around the shrine. Large numbers of tenant farmers came to Matsudaira Farm, and many originated in Toyama Prefecture. Their migration eventually shaped the culture of Higashi-Takasu so strongly that traditions brought from Toyama survived long after the original farm disappeared.
Asahikawa’s official history of the local Etchū Bon dance states that more than 300 households settled on Matsudaira Farm and that many of these settlers came from Toyama. They carried with them a Bon dance tradition associated with Aimoto in the former Unazuki area of Toyama. The migrants continued to perform the dance during the summer, maintaining a connection with their home communities while building new lives in Hokkaido.
This movement of people is also visible in surviving historical photographs. Hokkaido University’s northern materials collections preserve an image of prospective settlers gathered at Uozu Port in Toyama before departing for Matsudaira Farm. Such photographs provide an unusually human complement to land records and official farm reports. The development of the shrine took place alongside the movement of families who crossed the country, entered tenant agreements, cleared and cultivated fields, dug irrigation channels, raised animals, and created villages in the surrounding countryside.
For these settlers, a shrine could function as more than a place of individual prayer. It provided a location around which seasonal observances, communal gatherings, religious rites, and local identity could develop. Over time, this role became increasingly important because the community eventually survived the institution that had originally brought it together.
Imperial Visits and the Sacred Landscape
By the early twentieth century, the Matsudaira Farm shrine had also become associated with visits by members of the imperial family. The official history of Kokoku Shrine records that on August 11, 1919, Prince Fushimi Hiroyoshi and Prince Kachō Hirotada visited the shrine. On August 3, 1920, Prince Kuni Kunihisa and Prince Kuni Asaakira also visited.
According to the shrine history, the visiting princes worshiped at the site and planted pine trees. These commemorative plantings added another layer to the shrine landscape. The grounds became not only a sacred space associated with Izumo and the Matsudaira family, but also a place where visits by members of the imperial house were physically remembered through living trees and memorial objects.
The surviving monuments and plantings are therefore historical evidence in their own right. Shrines are often studied through documents, but the grounds themselves can preserve a different type of archive. Trees, stone inscriptions, memorials, bridges, approaches, and changes in the arrangement of buildings can reveal how generations of worshipers understood a sacred place and which events they believed deserved permanent commemoration.
At Kokoku Shrine, the landscape became a record of relationships among aristocratic landowners, imperial visitors, agricultural settlers, and the religious traditions carried into northern Hokkaido.
The Breaking Up of Matsudaira Farm
The most important transformation in the shrine’s history came during the 1930s, when the social and economic system that had created Matsudaira Farm began to disappear.
Large tenant estates had played an important role in Hokkaido’s early agricultural development, but the relationship between large landowners and tenant farmers became increasingly difficult to maintain. Rural economic problems, tenant disputes, government programs encouraging owner-operated farms, and changing agricultural policies contributed to the dissolution of large estates. Asahikawa’s municipal history treats the breaking up of Matsudaira Farm as part of this larger movement toward the creation of independent farm ownership.
In May 1937, the release of Matsudaira Farm was publicly commemorated. The location chosen for the ceremony was the precincts of what became Kokoku Shrine.
Asahikawa City’s Cultural Promotion Division records that Count Matsudaira and his wife attended the ceremony and that approximately 150 young people of Toyama origin performed the Etchū dance before them. The scene brought together nearly every strand of the community’s history. The aristocratic family that had created the farm was present. The descendants and families of migrants who had cultivated it were represented through a tradition carried from Toyama. The ceremony took place on sacred ground established through the religious traditions of the Matsudaira family.
The farm was disappearing as an institution, but the community created around it remained.
From Farm Shrine to Kokoku Shrine
The dissolution of Matsudaira Farm did not bring an end to its shrine. Instead, it helped transform the shrine from a guardian institution connected with a private agricultural estate into a more formal community shrine.
The Hokkaido Shrine Association states that when the farm was released in 1937, small shrines scattered throughout the district were consolidated. On July 14, 1938, an application was submitted for the establishment of the shrine. Formal approval followed on August 4, 1939. The shrine was thereafter recognized as Kokoku Shrine.
This transition is central to understanding the shrine’s importance. The original religious site had been created to guard Matsudaira Farm. Once the estate disappeared, the shrine might also have disappeared or remained only a private family memorial. Instead, religious sites scattered through the former farm community were brought together, allowing the shrine to become a spiritual center for a population no longer defined simply as tenants of the Matsudaira estate.
There is another dating problem in the surviving histories. The Hokkaido Shrine Association states that notice of the shrine’s completed establishment was filed on February 15, 1940. Asahikawa City’s official chronology instead records March 15, 1940, as the date of completion. The municipal chronology identifies the Jinja Meisaichō and later local historical studies among the sources behind its entry, making the discrepancy worth preserving until the underlying administrative records can be compared directly.
Rather than weakening the history of Kokoku Shrine, this disagreement illustrates how shrine history is reconstructed. Institutional traditions, municipal chronologies, government registers, local histories, farm documents, and physical evidence can preserve slightly different versions of the same event.
Kokoku Shrine in Wartime and Postwar Japan
The formal establishment of Kokoku Shrine occurred during the final years of the prewar Japanese shrine system. Its approval in 1939 and completion in 1940 placed the shrine within a period when Shinto institutions were closely regulated through government administrative structures.
Only a few years later, Japan’s defeat in 1945 transformed the legal position of shrines throughout the country. The prewar relationship between shrines and the state was dismantled, and shrines that continued operating did so within the new postwar system of private religious organizations.
According to the Hokkaido Shrine Association, Kokoku Shrine became a religious corporation under the postwar shrine organization in 1953. Its administrative status had changed dramatically, but the older religious inheritance remained visible in its deities, grounds, monuments, and connection with the families of Higashi-Takasu.
The Shrine Today
Kokoku Shrine remains in Asahikawa’s Higashi-Takasu district, where the landscape around it has changed considerably since the years of Matsudaira Farm. The Hokkaido Shrine Association lists Ōkuninushi-no-Kami and Matsudaira Naomasa as its enshrined deities and identifies August 10 as the date of its annual festival.
The shrine building is described as being constructed in the taisha-zukuri style, a particularly appropriate architectural reference for a shrine whose religious ancestry is tied so closely to Izumo Taisha. The grounds cover more than 12,000 square meters, leaving space not only for worship but also for the monuments, trees, and other physical traces accumulated through more than a century of local history.
Historical photographs provide another way of following that continuity. Asahikawa’s municipal digital archive preserves an image specifically identified as Kokoku Shrine from before 1970, while earlier photographs show Matsudaira Farm during the years when the shrine community was still developing. Seen together, these images allow the history of the site to be followed from an aristocratic agricultural estate to a permanent religious institution within modern Asahikawa.
Remembering Matsudaira Farm Through Religion
The history of Kokoku Shrine demonstrates how a religious site can survive the institution that created it.
Matsudaira Farm no longer exists as the large tenant estate established during the Meiji period. Its fields passed into different forms of ownership, its tenants became independent farmers and residents, and Higashi-Takasu eventually became part of the modern city of Asahikawa. Yet the shrine that began as the farm’s guardian remained.
Within its history survive the Matsudaira family’s connections to Matsue and Izumo, the worship of Ōkuninushi, the deification and remembrance of Matsudaira Naomasa, the migration of farming families from Toyama, the development of Hokkaido agriculture, the visits of imperial princes, and the transformation of tenant farmers into a community increasingly independent of the estate that had originally brought many of them together.
The 1937 ceremony perhaps captures that history better than any other single event. Matsudaira Farm was being formally released, marking the end of one era, yet the ceremony took place inside the shrine grounds. Young people descended from or connected with settlers from Toyama performed a dance brought from their ancestral home while Count Matsudaira and his wife watched.
The agricultural estate was ending, but the culture created around it was not.
Kokoku Shrine endured because its meaning had expanded beyond the private farm for which it had originally been established. What began as a guardian shrine for the Matsudaira estate became a repository of community memory, linking Izumo, Matsue, Toyama, and Hokkaido within a single sacred landscape.
For the religious history of Asahikawa, Kokoku Shrine is therefore more than a surviving neighborhood shrine. It is evidence of the way Shinto practices traveled with families, landowners, and migrants during the settlement of modern Hokkaido, and of the way a religious institution could transform as the society surrounding it changed. The fields of Matsudaira Farm were divided generations ago, but within Kokoku Shrine, important pieces of that world remain.
Sources & Further Reading
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Jinja Meisaichō [神社明細帳]. National Institute of Japanese Literature. Cited in the Asahikawa City historical chronology and source apparatus. Asahikawa chronology source guide
Matsudaira Farm. Matsudaira Nōjō Yōran [松平農場要覧]. Hokkaido, n.d. Formerly held by the Historical Museum of Hokkaido. Cited in Asahikawa City’s historical source apparatus. Asahikawa chronology source guide
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