South of central Asahikawa, where the city gives way to the agricultural landscape of Nishi-Kagura, stands Kagura Shrine, or Kagura Jinja. Its history is tied closely to the settlement of the surrounding countryside during the Meiji period, when new villages, farms, roads, railways, schools, and religious institutions appeared across the Kamikawa basin.
The shrine at issue is the Kagura Shrine at Nishi-Kagura 2-sen 15-go 273-1 in Asahikawa. It should not be confused with Higashikagura Shrine in neighboring Higashikagura Town, which was itself once known as Kagura Shrine and has a similar late nineteenth-century history. That similarity has caused the histories of the two shrines to become mixed together in some modern searches.
According to the Hokkaido Jinja-chō, Kagura Shrine today enshrines Amaterasu Sume-Ōkami, Hachiman Ōkami, and Kasuga Ōkami. Its annual festival is held on September 2, and its former official rank was sonsha, or village shrine. The shrine’s recorded history reaches back to the 1890s, when settlers in what was then Kagura Village began trying to establish a common tutelary shrine for their new community.
The story that followed is more than the history of a single shrine building. Kagura Shrine grew beside the transformation of imperial estate land into an agricultural settlement, became the setting for a lion dance carried north from Toyama Prefecture, passed through the state-administered shrine system of modern Japan, and survived the institutional break that followed the Second World War.
Imperial Estate Land and the Making of Kagura Village
To understand why Kagura Shrine appeared when it did, it is necessary to begin before the shrine itself.
During the late nineteenth century the Japanese government accelerated the colonization and administrative reorganization of Hokkaido. The Kamikawa basin became a particular focus of this effort. Government planners surveyed land, laid out settlements, created villages, developed transportation routes, and reserved large tracts for military and imperial purposes.
Asahikawa’s official historical chronology records that in October 1889 more than 10,000 chō of land in the Kamikawa district was incorporated into what became the Kamikawa Imperial Estate, an area that later lay within Kagura Village. The following year additional government land was incorporated into imperial holdings. The area was also connected to government discussions about an imperial villa in Kamikawa, a project that was investigated but never developed in the manner originally envisioned.
Kagura Village emerged within this rapidly changing landscape. The official history of Kagura Shrine dates the establishment of the village to 1892 and states that land was subsequently made available to private settlers. As settlement increased, communities that had existed largely on survey maps began to take on the institutions of permanent village life. Farms were cleared, roads were created, schools and religious institutions appeared, and the agricultural settlement expanded.
This imperial-estate background remained important well beyond the founding years. Asahikawa’s municipal history treats the setting and leasing of imperial lands, migration, transportation, agriculture, schools, and religious institutions as central parts of the early history of Kagura Village. A contemporary village history, Kamui-mura Kagura-mura Sonshi, published by the Kagura-Kamui village union in 1916, survives as an unusually valuable source produced while the community was still developing and only two years before Kagura Shrine received its formal village-shrine status.
Kagura Shrine was therefore not established in an old village with centuries of accumulated religious institutions. It grew with a newly organized community whose residents were creating a local identity while adapting older religious practices to a new landscape.
The First Enshrinement in 1897
The Hokkaido Jinja-chō preserves the traditional account of the shrine’s beginning in 1897, or Meiji 30.
By that time the population of Kagura Village had increased enough that settlers proposed establishing a common ujigami, a tutelary kami for the village. One resident of Nishi-Kagura, Tamura Kumatarō, played the central role in the foundation story. According to the shrine’s official account, Tamura made a small shrine-shaped object from katsura wood and inscribed upon it the names of three kami.
There was not yet an elaborate sanctuary waiting to receive them. The small sacred object was instead enshrined on a tree stump.
That image captures something important about the religious history of settlement-era Hokkaido. The shrine did not begin with monumental architecture. The act of enshrinement came first. A community of settlers selected kami, created a physical focus for their worship, and placed it within the landscape they were attempting to make into a permanent home. Only later did successive generations surround that act with larger buildings, land, gates, offices, festival organizations, and institutional recognition.
The surviving research record identifies a 1982 volume, Chinju Kagura Jinja-shi, or History of the Tutelary Kagura Shrine, as the major shrine-specific institutional history. The Asahikawa City Library itself recommends that work when answering questions about the old Nishi-Goryōchi shrine tradition. The existence of that local history is important because the concise foundation narrative preserved by the Hokkaido Jinja-chō is part of a much larger body of local documentation surrounding the shrine.
A Festival Before There Was a Formal Village Shrine
One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the shrine’s early religious life comes not from the later shrine chronology but from the history of a dance.
Settlers had arrived in the Nishi-Goryōchi area from many parts of Japan. Among them were migrants connected with the old Kosurido Village area of Shimoniikawa District in Toyama Prefecture. Asahikawa City’s Cultural Promotion Division identifies Satake Seijirō, Yanagisawa Takejirō, and Satake Yasujirō among those who carried knowledge of a Toyama lion-dance tradition into the new settlement. Satake Seijirō was remembered as an accomplished flute player, while Yanagisawa was known for his skill in the lion dance.
During pauses in the work of clearing and cultivating the land, they taught other settlers the dances and music they remembered from their former home.
Then, in 1898, only about a year after the traditional founding of Kagura Shrine, the settlers offered the lion dance before the kami during the shrine’s autumn festival.
The municipal history of Kagura Shishimai identifies that performance as the beginning of the local tradition. By the following year the group had developed into a more formal twelve-person organization including the lion and small tengu performers.
That 1898 performance is especially valuable for reconstructing the shrine’s early history. The later institutional chronology dates the shrine’s first enshrinement to 1897, but the lion-dance history provides separate evidence that Kagura Shrine was already functioning as a recognizable place of communal festival worship almost immediately afterward. The shrine was not simply an object placed on a stump and forgotten while residents waited for official approval. Ritual life had already begun.
It also reveals how traditions moved with migrants. Those who left Toyama for Hokkaido did not leave every part of their former communities behind. Songs, dances, festival customs, religious memories, and forms of local association traveled with them. Kagura Shrine became one place where those inherited traditions could be planted in new soil.
From a Tree Stump to a Permanent Shrine
The first enshrinement was modest, but the community soon began building something more permanent.
According to the Hokkaido Jinja-chō chronology, a shrine building of approximately thirteen tsubo was erected in 1901. Three years later, in 1904, more than four chō and five tan of shrine land was granted for use without charge. The land arrangement again shows how closely the shrine’s development was connected with the imperial estate system that shaped the settlement of western Kagura.
As the settlement grew, the first building also became insufficient.
In August 1912, the first year of the Taishō era, a second and substantially larger honden and haiden complex was completed. The Hokkaido Jinja-chō records its size as twenty-seven tsubo. By then the shrine had moved far beyond its original stump-side beginning. There was now a developed sacred precinct, a purpose-built sanctuary, an annual festival tradition, and a community that had spent roughly fifteen years treating the shrine as its local religious center.
This physical growth paralleled the development of Kagura itself. The early twentieth century brought further agricultural development and increased population to the surrounding village. Asahikawa’s municipal histories describe Kagura as developing rapidly into an agricultural community, with transportation, schools, religious institutions, rice cultivation, and a growing village center forming alongside one another.
The shrine belonged to that process.
Village Shrine Status in 1918
Kagura Shrine had existed for roughly two decades before receiving the official status that would define its place within Japan’s prewar shrine administration.
In August 1918, according to the shrine’s institutional chronology, Kagura Shrine received formal approval for its establishment and was ranked as a sonsha, or village shrine.
That designation carried a specific meaning in the shrine system created during the Meiji period. Village shrines belonged to the broader class of non-state shrines and generally represented shrines connected to the tutelary religious life of a village. Kokugakuin University’s Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that the sonsha category developed within the modern shrine-ranking system and came to be associated especially with shrines venerating a village ujigami. The official ranking system disappeared after the Second World War.
For Kagura Shrine, the 1918 recognition therefore represented the formal administrative acceptance of something the settlers themselves had already been practicing for years.
The sequence is important. The shrine was not created by the government in 1918. Its community origin had already been established in 1897, its autumn festival and lion dance were documented by 1898, its first shrine building was constructed in 1901, and a larger sanctuary followed in 1912. Government recognition came afterward.
The surviving source trail suggests that more detail about that transition may remain in records such as the Hokkaidō Government Gazette, shrine registers known as Jinja Meisaichō, and Kagura-Kamui village administrative records from the years immediately surrounding 1918. Those documents are particularly important because Asahikawa’s historical archive identifies village administrative reports for 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1919 among the sources preserved for reconstructing the period.
The Three Kami of Kagura Shrine
The religious identity of Kagura Shrine rests upon the three kami named in its foundation tradition and still listed by the Hokkaido Jinja-chō today: Amaterasu Sume-Ōkami, Hachiman Ōkami, and Kasuga Ōkami.
Amaterasu occupies one of the most important positions in the Japanese religious tradition. The Encyclopedia of Shinto describes Amaterasu as the kami of the sun and the ruler of Takamanohara in the mythology recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Amaterasu is also the principal kami of the Inner Shrine at Ise and is understood within Shinto tradition as an ancestral kami of the imperial house.
Hachiman developed one of the most widespread cults in Japanese religious history. The Hachiman tradition began around Usa in Kyushu before spreading across Japan, eventually producing a vast network of Hachiman shrines and local forms of devotion.
The Kasuga tradition is historically associated with the kami worshipped at Kasuga in Nara and with the Fujiwara clan. Over time, Kasuga worship spread far beyond its original political and aristocratic setting.
Bringing these three traditions together gave the new settlement a religious vocabulary that connected a remote Meiji-period farming community in Hokkaido with much older centers of Japanese worship.
Yet at Kagura Shrine these were not merely distant national traditions. They became the kami of a particular local community. The settlers worshipped them beside newly cultivated fields, carried festival traditions before them, built and rebuilt their sanctuary, and eventually established Kagura Shrine as the chinju, or tutelary shrine, of their own locality.
Kagura Shishimai and the Memory of Toyama
Few parts of Kagura Shrine’s history illustrate the relationship between migration and religion better than Kagura Shishimai.
The dance originated in the traditions brought by settlers from the old Kosurido area of Toyama Prefecture. Asahikawa City’s later investigation found that identifying the exact source community is somewhat complicated. Satake and Yanagisawa family names were particularly common in the Ichiyadori area of the former village, while another participant’s surname was associated with another section. The safest conclusion reached by the city was that the dance was transmitted through settlers from the broader former Kosurido village area rather than from a single precisely identified hamlet.
What is not uncertain is the shrine’s place in the tradition.
The first recorded offering occurred at Kagura Shrine’s autumn festival in 1898. The practice was subsequently transmitted through the local youth organization until 1944. The disruption of the final wartime years threatened that chain of transmission, and the equipment was placed into storage after the old youth organization dissolved.
The tradition did not disappear.
On August 10, 1947, a preservation organization was established, allowing the dance to return to community life. For a time it was also called Seiwa Shishimai because of its close association with the Seiwa district. The modern Kagura Shishimai tradition retains distinctive features, including a two-person lion and the prominent role of numerous tengu performers.
The festival connection also survived. Asahikawa City’s record of the preservation society’s activities shows performances on the grounds of Kagura Shrine and an offering of shishimai during the September 2 Kagura Shrine festival, accompanying the mikoshi through the broader Kagura district.
More than a century after migrants carried the tradition from Toyama to Hokkaido, the dance therefore remains connected to the same shrine where it was first offered in 1898.
War, Defeat, and the Postwar Shrine
The end of the Second World War transformed the institutional world in which Kagura Shrine had existed since receiving its village-shrine rank.
The prewar shrine ranking system was abolished in 1946, meaning that Kagura Shrine’s sonsha designation ceased to have official legal significance. The Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that village shrine status, like the other ranks of the modern system, disappeared with the postwar restructuring of shrine administration.
Kagura Shrine nevertheless continued as a religious institution.
Its official chronology records the establishment of its postwar religious-corporation organization in 1946 and gubernatorial certification in March 1954. The shrine’s legal and administrative relationship to the state had changed, but the local practices that had developed around it did not depend entirely upon the old ranking system. The annual festival, shrine worship, local associations, and eventually the revived lion-dance tradition continued.
The contrast with 1918 is striking. That year had brought incorporation into a state-recognized hierarchy of shrines. The postwar years removed that hierarchy. In both periods, however, Kagura Shrine remained because a local community continued to use and maintain it.
Rebuilding the Shrine
The physical appearance of Kagura Shrine continued to change during the twentieth century.
The shrine chronology records repairs to the roof in 1927 and foundation work on portions of the sanctuary in 1930. In 1966, as part of a seventieth-anniversary commemoration, a mikoshi was produced and a mikoshi building constructed. A large torii was restored in 1970.
The most significant modern rebuilding came in 1979, when construction of a new shrine building was completed in September. A new shrine office followed in October 1980.
In 1982 the shrine published its own history, Chinju Kagura Jinja-shi. Four years later additional work associated with the ninetieth anniversary included improvements such as a tamagaki fence, torii, amulet distribution facility, and purification pavilion. Further commemorative work was carried out for the shrine’s centennial in 1996, including improvements to the approach.
These successive construction campaigns also explain why a visitor today should not imagine that the surviving buildings reproduce the modest shrine of the Meiji period. The sacred site has remained, but each generation has left something of its own around it.
Kagura Shrine Today
The present shrine is listed by the Hokkaido Jinja-chō as a Shinmei-zukuri structure with a sanctuary area of forty tsubo and a precinct covering 12,490 square meters. Its annual festival remains September 2.
The route into the shrine itself reflects the meeting of old religious space and modern transportation. A red torii marks the approach through the rural Nishi-Kagura landscape, while the Furano railway line and roads that helped integrate the district into the wider Asahikawa region now pass through the same surroundings once opened by settlers.
Inside that landscape is a history that began with almost nothing resembling the developed shrine visible today.
There was first a newly settled district on imperial estate land. Then there was a proposal among settlers for a village tutelary shrine. A man named Tamura Kumatarō made a small object of worship and placed it upon a stump. Within a year, the autumn festival had become a place where settlers from Toyama offered the dances of their former home. A permanent building followed, then a larger sanctuary, then formal recognition, then the institutional upheaval of the postwar era, and finally successive rebuilding campaigns that created the modern shrine.
Why Kagura Shrine Matters
Kagura Shrine is easy to overlook beside the older and more prominent shrines of Japan, yet its relatively recent foundation is precisely what makes it historically useful.
It shows how shrines could form within newly settled communities during the Meiji period. Rather than stretching backward through medieval or ancient history, Kagura Shrine allows the development of a local sacred institution to be followed almost generation by generation.
Its history also demonstrates that settlement was not merely an economic process. Migrants did not simply clear forests and plant crops. They established places of worship, rebuilt community associations, transmitted festival traditions, and carried religious practices from one part of Japan to another.
The 1898 lion dance may be the clearest example. Men whose families had crossed from Toyama to Hokkaido taught one another the music and movements they remembered from home, then performed them before the kami of a shrine that itself had scarcely existed a year. What began as a transplanted village tradition became part of Nishi-Kagura’s own religious heritage.
More than a century later, Kagura Shrine remains a reminder that the religious landscape of Hokkaido was shaped not only by government policy and institutional Shinto, but also by ordinary settlers deciding that a new community needed a sacred center of its own.
Sources & Further Reading
Hokkaidō Jinja-chō. “神楽神社 [Kagura Shrine].” Accessed September 28, 2026. https://hokkaidojinjacho.jp/神楽神社/
Asahikawa City, Cultural Promotion Division. “郷土芸能 神楽獅子舞 [Local Performing Art: Kagura Shishimai].” Last modified December 5, 2019. https://www.city.asahikawa.hokkaido.jp/kurashi/329/348/353/p000233.html
神楽神社史編集委員会 [Kagura Shrine History Editorial Committee], ed. 鎮守 神楽神社史 [History of the Tutelary Kagura Shrine]. Asahikawa, 1982. Identified by Asahikawa City Central Library as its principal reference for the former Nishi-Goryōchi shrine. https://www.city.asahikawa.hokkaido.jp/central_library/document/d080605_d/fil/Shithumon_kyoudo_2013.pdf
Adachi, Risaburō. 神居村神楽村村史 [History of Kamui and Kagura Villages]. 1916. Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/catalog-list/list001
神楽村東神楽村村史編集委員会 [Kagura Village and Higashikagura Village History Editorial Committee], ed. 神楽村開基60年史 [Sixty-Year History of Kagura Village]. 1951. Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/catalog-list/list001
西神楽郷土回顧録刊行会 [Nishi-Kagura Local Reminiscences Publication Association], ed. 回顧録にしかぐら [Reminiscences of Nishi-Kagura]. Asahikawa: 西神楽郷土回顧録刊行会, 1980. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA36402611
Hirata, Kōsaku. “聖和獅子舞の由来 [Origins of Seiwa Shishimai].” In 回顧録にしかぐら. Asahikawa, 1980. Cited by Asahikawa City in its history of Kagura Shishimai. https://www.city.asahikawa.hokkaido.jp/kurashi/329/348/353/p000233.html
神楽村神居村組合役場 [Kagura-Kamui Village Union Office]. 大正4年神楽村神居村村治一班及事務挭概 [Administrative Conditions and Summary of Affairs of Kagura and Kamui Villages, 1915]. 1915. Listed in Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
神楽村神居村組合役場 [Kagura-Kamui Village Union Office]. 大正5年神楽神居両村事務並概況 [Affairs and General Conditions of Kagura and Kamui Villages, 1916]. 1916. Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
神楽村神居村組合役場 [Kagura-Kamui Village Union Office]. 大正6年神楽神居両村事務並概況 [Affairs and General Conditions of Kagura and Kamui Villages, 1917]. 1917. Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
神楽村神居村組合役場 [Kagura-Kamui Village Union Office]. 大正8年神楽神居両村事務並概況 [Affairs and General Conditions of Kagura and Kamui Villages, 1919]. 1919. Asahikawa City Digital Archives. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
北海道庁 [Hokkaidō Government]. 北海道庁公報 [Hokkaidō Government Gazette]. Especially 1918 issues concerning shrine administration. Listed among the primary sources used by Asahikawa City’s historical chronology. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
National Institute of Japanese Literature. 神社明細帳 [Jinja Meisaichō, Shrine Registers]. Cited among the primary sources used by Asahikawa City’s historical chronology. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
Kokugakuin University Institute for Japanese Culture, ed. 北海道神社明細帳の分析 [Analysis of the Hokkaido Shrine Registers]. Tokyo: Kokugakuin University Institute for Japanese Culture, 1997. https://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/oardijcc/publications/Hokkaido_Jinja.html
帝室林野局 [Imperial Forestry Bureau], ed. 帝室林野局五十年史 [Fifty-Year History of the Imperial Forestry Bureau]. Tokyo: 帝室林野局, 1939. https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000000726049
Asahikawa City History Editorial Council. 新旭川市史 [New History of Asahikawa City]. 8 vols. Asahikawa: Asahikawa City, 1993–2012. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/catalog-list/list001-01
Asahikawa City. 旭川市史稿 [Draft History of Asahikawa City]. 2 vols. Asahikawa: Asahikawa City, 1931. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/catalog/ct00000009
Asahikawa City. “年表の出典 [Sources for the Historical Chronology].” 旭川のあゆみ [The History of Asahikawa]. Accessed September 28, 2026. This source guide identifies the shrine registers, government gazette, village reports, shrine history, Imperial Forestry Bureau history, and other documentary collections used by the city. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/01chronology/01ref.html
Asahikawa City. “書籍で調べる旭川 [Researching Asahikawa through Books].” 旭川のあゆみ. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://adeac.jp/asahikawa-city/top/03book/index.html
Hokkaido University Library. “上川郡神楽村西御料地土功組合灌漑溝 [Irrigation Canal of the Nishi-Goryōchi Land Improvement Association, Kagura Village, Kamikawa District].” Northern Studies Collection Database. Meiji-Taishō period. https://www.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/hoppodb/
Inoue, Nobutaka. “Sonsha.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. Kokugakuin University Digital Museum. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=8849
Kokugakuin University Digital Museum. “Amaterasu.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=9440
Kokugakuin University Digital Museum. “Hachiman Shinkō.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=8878
Kokugakuin University Digital Museum. “Kasuga Shinkō.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=8886
Kokugakuin University Digital Museum. “Sansha Takusen.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. Accessed September 28, 2026. Particularly useful for historical context concerning the combination of Amaterasu, Hachiman, and Kasuga traditions. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/id=8568