In the Moshiri district of Akabira, Hokkaido, stands a shrine whose history reaches back to the first years of permanent Japanese settlement along the Sorachi River. Today officially known as Izumo Shrine, or Izumo Jinja, it is also commonly identified with the community it has served for generations as Moshiri Izumo Shrine.
Its story is closely tied to the history of Akabira itself. Before coal mines, company housing, rail traffic, and industrial development reshaped the valley, the area consisted largely of forest, riverbank, and newly opened agricultural land. According to the history preserved by the Hokkaido Shrine Association, settlers established a small sanctuary dedicated to Susanoo no Mikoto during this pioneer period. The shrine survived one of Hokkaido’s great nineteenth century floods, moved as the population shifted toward the growing mining settlement, and was rebuilt in 1930 as the community around Moshiri expanded.
What began as a small settlers’ shrine eventually became part of the religious and social landscape of one of Akabira’s most important coal communities. Historical photographs preserved by Akabira City show residents connected with Moshiri Mine visiting a shrine around the middle of the twentieth century and participating in religious festivals during the mining era. Together with the shrine’s own historical tradition, these records reveal how Shinto practice became woven into a community shaped first by settlement and then by coal.
Settlement Along the Sorachi River
The official history of Izumo Shrine places its beginnings within the larger movement of settlers into central Hokkaido during the Meiji period. In the summer of 1890, according to the shrine account, people living around Utashinai began following routes through the interior in search of suitable farmland. The region along the Sorachi River was still heavily forested, and travel through the area could be difficult.
The shrine tradition describes settlers crossing the Sorachi River on rafts after recognizing cultivable land on the opposite bank. The first clearing and cultivation of this land became part of what the shrine’s history remembers as the beginning of agricultural settlement in the Akabira area. Moshiri gradually appeared as part of this frontier landscape.
For the settlers entering a new environment, religious practice accompanied the work of clearing land and establishing homes. The pioneers erected a small shrine and worshiped Susanoo no Mikoto, one of the most prominent deities in Shinto tradition. Susanoo is associated with several different traditions in Japanese religious history and is often connected with protection, strength, and the overcoming of dangerous forces. In the environment described by the shrine’s historical account, the establishment of a sanctuary dedicated to him carried practical as well as religious meaning.
The original shrine was therefore not the substantial institution that later generations knew. It appears to have been a small community sanctuary created by settlers during the earliest phase of permanent cultivation. That beginning is important because it places the origins of Izumo Shrine before the coal development that eventually transformed Moshiri. The shrine belonged first to a farming frontier.
The Great Flood of 1898
One of the most dramatic episodes in the shrine’s traditional history occurred in September 1898.
The Hokkaido Shrine Association records that the Sorachi River suddenly rose, destroying much of the settlers’ crops. Residents escaped while carrying household possessions and the sacred object associated with their small shrine. The story presents the rescue of the shrine’s sacred presence alongside the preservation of the settlers’ own belongings, suggesting how closely the sanctuary had already become connected with the identity of the community.
Government river records provide important independent evidence for the disaster surrounding this tradition. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism identifies the September 1898 flood of the Ishikari River system as one of the great disasters of Hokkaido’s settlement era. Approximately 1,500 square kilometers were inundated across the wider river basin, about 18,600 houses were affected, and 112 people died. The flood became so significant that it helped push the Hokkaido government toward systematic flood control planning.
Heavy rain and storms affected the basin over several days. The floodwaters reached communities throughout a region that was only beginning to develop permanent transportation, agricultural, and settlement infrastructure. Many families lost homes or farmland, while some abandoned their attempts to settle in Hokkaido altogether.
The government records do not themselves verify every detail of the Izumo Shrine story. They do, however, establish that the shrine’s tradition of a devastating September 1898 flood fits the historical circumstances of one of the most destructive floods of the period.
For the shrine community, survival became part of its remembered identity. The sanctuary had been established by people trying to make permanent homes in a difficult environment, and the preservation of its sacred object during the flood linked the shrine with the continued survival of the settlement itself.
Coal Comes to Moshiri
The next major transformation came not from the river but from underground.
Coal development changed Akabira from an agricultural settlement into one of Hokkaido’s important mining communities. Moshiri became one of the earliest centers of that transformation. Akabira City’s historical archive dates the opening of Moshiri Mine by Ōkura Kōgyō to 1918. Surviving photographs held by the city show mining facilities, coal transportation equipment, mine entrances, and workers from the mine’s early years.
There is a small but important chronological disagreement in the historical record. The shrine’s official history states that industrialist Ōkura Kihachirō began coal operations at Moshiri in 1917, while the Akabira City historical collection gives 1918 as the opening year of the mine. The surviving evidence available online does not completely resolve the difference. It is possible that the dates distinguish initial development from formal mine opening, but company or government mining records would be necessary before stating that explanation as fact.
Whatever the precise beginning of operations, the larger change is clear. Mining brought workers, families, buildings, transportation infrastructure, stores, housing, and new forms of community organization into Moshiri.
Akabira City’s historical collections describe the mining settlements as compact communities in which workplaces and residences existed close together. A strong sense of collective identity developed among miners and their families, sometimes expressed through the idea of ichizan ikka, or “one mine, one family.” Religious institutions existed inside this changing social environment rather than apart from it.
The old settlers’ shrine would soon change with the community around it.
The Shrine Moves in 1926
By the 1920s, the center of life in Moshiri was no longer the same frontier landscape in which the original shrine had been established.
The population associated with mining and related businesses created a larger and more concentrated settlement. In September 1926, the shrine was transferred to its present location. The official shrine history directly connects the relocation with the development of coal mining in Moshiri.
The move represented more than a physical transfer of a religious structure. It reflected the changing geography of the community.
Early religious life had followed agricultural settlers onto newly cleared land. Now the shrine followed the population toward the mining settlement. The institution established by pioneers in the Meiji period was adapting to a community shaped increasingly by industrial labor.
Historical materials from the period make it possible to reconstruct at least part of that wider world. Hokkaido archival collections preserve religious and financial records from Moshiri during the 1920s, including donation books and financial ledgers associated with the local Buddhist community. Although these are not records of Izumo Shrine itself, they demonstrate that Moshiri supported an increasingly organized religious and social life during precisely the years surrounding the shrine’s relocation. The surviving collections include records covering 1925 through 1927 and other financial books extending through 1940.
Future examination of shrine records, property registers, municipal documents, and surviving donor lists could provide a much clearer picture of who participated in the 1926 move and how the project was financed.
A New Shrine in 1930
The decisive moment in the development of the modern shrine came four years after the relocation.
On August 27, 1930, a new shrine building was constructed. According to the history preserved by the Hokkaido Shrine Association, the project commemorated the imperial accession ceremonies of Emperor Shōwa. The community spent 1,500 yen on the building and commissioned the shrine carpenter Mutō Ihebei of Hiragishi to undertake the work.
The precision of these details is notable. The exact date, monetary amount, and carpenter’s name suggest that the account probably ultimately derives from older shrine documentation, commemorative records, inscriptions, or materials once preserved by the institution or its parish community.
The 1930 project also changed the religious identity of the shrine. Ōkuninushi no Mikoto was enshrined alongside Susanoo, and the sanctuary adopted the name Izumo Shrine.
The choice of name connected the local shrine symbolically with one of the most famous religious traditions in Japan. Ōkuninushi is especially associated with Izumo and with the religious traditions centered upon Izumo Taisha in Shimane Prefecture. The adoption of the Izumo name therefore represented a significant development from the earlier settlers’ sanctuary devoted primarily to Susanoo.
The shrine that had begun in the frontier environment of Meiji-era Hokkaido was becoming a more formally established institution serving a growing industrial community.
Today the Hokkaido Shrine Association lists Susanoo no Mikoto, Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, and Ōyamazumi no Kami among the shrine’s deities. The available online historical account explicitly identifies the addition of Ōkuninushi in 1930 but does not give a clear date for the enshrinement of Ōyamazumi. For that reason, the date of the latter’s inclusion should remain open unless older shrine records establish it.
A Shrine in the Mining Community
The strongest visual evidence for the shrine’s place in twentieth century Moshiri comes from photographs preserved by Akabira City.
One image in the city’s collection is cataloged as “Moshiri Mine. People visiting a shrine.” The photograph, archive number 07_n_008_0007, dates from the middle of the Shōwa 20s, approximately around 1950. The surviving image provides important primary visual evidence that shrine visitation formed part of community life associated with Moshiri Mine during the postwar mining era.
The photograph matters because institutional shrine histories usually preserve dates, construction projects, names, and deities, but photographs capture religious practice as something experienced by ordinary people. Here, the historical record moves away from the administrative history of the shrine and toward the miners and families who lived around it.
Akabira City’s photographic collections preserve the surrounding world in extraordinary detail. They show company housing, communal water facilities, stores, mining equipment, public gatherings, recreational activities, parades, and religious celebrations. Together they reveal a community in which work, family life, entertainment, neighborhood institutions, and religious practice existed within the same concentrated mining landscape.
Izumo Shrine belonged to that world.
It was no longer simply a surviving religious institution from an earlier agricultural settlement. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had become part of the cultural landscape of a coal town.
Mountain Gods, Festivals, and the Mine
Mining communities throughout Japan developed religious practices surrounding safety, mountains, dangerous labor, and the uncertainties of extracting resources from underground. The historical record from Moshiri preserves evidence of this religious world as well.
A photograph owned by Akabira City shows the Moshiri Mine Yamagami Matsuri, or mountain-god festival, around 1965. The partially completed mine shaft can be seen in the background. Another photograph from the same general period shows children resting during the festival after lowering a portable shrine.
These photographs do not by themselves establish that every aspect of Moshiri Mine’s mountain-god worship was directly administered by Izumo Shrine. That distinction is important. Mining religion could include company customs, occupational traditions, local shrines, and broader forms of mountain worship.
Yet the religious connection is particularly interesting because Izumo Shrine today lists Ōyamazumi no Kami among its enshrined deities. Ōyamazumi is a deity closely associated with mountains. The combination of shrine worship, mining festivals, mikoshi processions, and mountain-centered religious practice deserves further study through the shrine’s own festival records and Moshiri Mine company documents.
The available evidence at least demonstrates that religion remained highly visible in the mining community. Children participated in festivals. Workers and families visited shrines. Portable shrines moved through neighborhoods shaped by coal housing and industrial facilities.
Religion was therefore not something left behind when Moshiri changed from farmland to mining town. It adapted to the new community.
The Wider Religious Life of Moshiri
Izumo Shrine also existed within a religiously diverse local environment.
Archival records preserved by the Hokkaido Prefectural Archives document organized Buddhist activity in Moshiri during the same decades in which the Shinto shrine was being relocated and rebuilt. Financial books, donation registers, repair contribution records, and religious-community accounts survive from the 1920s and 1930s.
These records provide an important reminder that the religious history of a mining town cannot be understood through a single institution. Families could participate in Buddhist temple life, Shinto festivals, occupational ceremonies, household observances, ancestral practices, and community celebrations without treating those activities as mutually exclusive.
For a growing mining settlement, religious organizations also provided social structure. Donations recorded networks of households. Festivals gathered neighborhoods together. Shrines marked important spaces within the community. Rituals connected dangerous occupations with ideas of protection and divine presence.
In that setting, Izumo Shrine became one of the institutions through which Moshiri understood itself.
From Coal Town to Historical Community
The world surrounding the shrine changed dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century.
Moshiri Mine passed through several corporate owners and became one of the important mines associated with Akabira’s development. According to Akabira City’s historical archive, production reached a peak after the construction of a new vertical shaft during the 1960s. A catastrophic explosion in 1969 killed nineteen people and contributed to the mine’s closure.
As mining declined, the dense industrial communities that had once defined Akabira also changed. Company facilities disappeared, populations declined, and buildings that had served miners and their families were demolished.
The shrine remained.
That continuity gives Izumo Shrine particular historical importance. Its existence stretches across several distinct periods in the history of the region. It began among agricultural settlers, survived the great flood of 1898, moved as mining changed the settlement pattern, took its modern name during the early Shōwa period, served generations living around Moshiri Mine, and continued after the industrial economy that had once surrounded it contracted.
The modern address, Moshiri Motomachi Kita 1-chome 21, also hides some of that history. Akabira’s present system of town names in the Moshiri area was introduced much later, meaning researchers pursuing land records or early documents must search under older place names and parcel designations rather than relying exclusively on the modern address. The research trail preserved for the shrine specifically notes the importance of older land registers, cadastral maps, municipal records, and historical maps for reconstructing the 1926 relocation.
Izumo Shrine Today
The Hokkaido Shrine Association currently identifies the shrine as Izumo Jinja and gives its address as 1-21 Moshiri Motomachi Kita 1-chome, Akabira. Its principal festival is held on September 2.
The shrine is listed as having formerly possessed the status of an unranked shrine, or mukakusha, under the prewar shrine-ranking system. Its sanctuary is described as being built in the shinmei-zukuri architectural style. The association lists the shrine precinct at approximately 2,122 square meters and identifies Susanoo no Mikoto, Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, and Ōyamazumi no Kami as its enshrined deities.
A commemorative monument marking the history of Moshiri Izumo Shrine also survives within the precinct. Such monuments, together with stone lanterns, guardian figures, torii inscriptions, building plaques, and any surviving munafuda construction tablets, should be treated as primary historical sources. They may preserve donor names, reconstruction dates, priests, neighborhood representatives, and details absent from published accounts. The existing research trail identifies these physical sources as particularly promising for future study.
Much therefore remains to be discovered.
Why the History of Izumo Shrine Matters
Izumo Shrine is easy to describe simply as a small Shinto shrine in Akabira, but its history reveals something much larger about religion in modern Hokkaido.
The shrine followed the development of the community around it.
When settlers crossed the river and cleared farmland, they established a sanctuary. When floodwaters threatened the settlement, the shrine’s sacred object was carried to safety. When coal transformed Moshiri, the shrine moved toward the growing population. When the community built a larger sanctuary in 1930, new religious associations were added to the older pioneer tradition. When mining dominated daily life, residents continued visiting shrines and participating in religious festivals alongside shafts, company houses, stores, and industrial buildings.
Few surviving institutions connect so many stages of local history in one place.
The photographs preserved by Akabira City are especially valuable because they allow the shrine’s institutional history to be placed back among the people who actually lived around it. Men, women, and children in a mining settlement did not experience religion as a sequence of foundation dates. They encountered it through visits, festivals, neighborhood processions, seasonal observances, and rituals that existed alongside the dangers and routines of coal mining.
That is ultimately what makes Moshiri Izumo Shrine historically significant. It is a religious institution born from Hokkaido’s settlement period that continued through flood, industrial expansion, war, postwar reconstruction, mining prosperity, industrial decline, and the transformation of Akabira itself.
The coal mine that once defined Moshiri is now part of history. The shrine established by the community before that mine existed remains.
Sources & Further Reading
Hokkaido Shrine Association. “出雲神社 [Izumo Shrine].” Hokkaido Shrine Association. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://hokkaidojinjacho.jp/出雲神社/ Hokkaido Shrine Authority
Akabira City. “茂尻炭鉱(1) [Moshiri Coal Mine (1)].” Coal, Iron and Port Digital Museum. Historical photographs and materials held by Akabira City. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://3city.net/archives/database/akabira/3596/ 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Akabira City. “茂尻炭鉱(2) [Moshiri Coal Mine (2)].” Coal, Iron and Port Digital Museum. Historical photographs and materials held by Akabira City. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://3city.net/archives/database/akabira/3597/ 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Akabira City. “赤平の暮らし・行事(1) [Life and Events in Akabira (1)].” Coal, Iron and Port Digital Museum. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://3city.net/archives/database/akabira/3599/ 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Akabira City. “赤平の暮らし・行事(2) [Life and Events in Akabira (2)].” Coal, Iron and Port Digital Museum. Includes photographs of Moshiri Mine residents visiting a shrine and participating in the Yamagami festival. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://3city.net/archives/database/akabira/3600/ 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Akabira City. “赤平の暮らし・行事(3) [Life and Events in Akabira (3)].” Coal, Iron and Port Digital Museum. Accessed September 28, 2026. https://3city.net/archives/database/akabira/3601/ 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Akabira City Compilation Committee, ed. 赤平市史 上巻 [History of Akabira City, vol. 1]. Akabira: Akabira City, 2001. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Akabira City Compilation Committee, ed. 赤平市史 下巻 [History of Akabira City, vol. 2]. Akabira: Akabira City, 2001. National Diet Library reference record
Akabira City History Compilation Committee, ed. 赤平八十年史 [Eighty-Year History of Akabira]. Akabira: Akabira City, 1973. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Akabira City. “字名・町名沿革 [History of District and Town Names].” Akabira City Regulations. Accessed September 28, 2026. Akabira City record Akabira City
Akabira City. “赤平市炭鉱遺産ガイダンス施設 [Akabira Coal Mining Heritage Guidance Facility].” Accessed September 28, 2026. Akabira City Akabira City
Hokkaido Shrine Association Editorial Committee, ed. 北海道神社庁誌 [History of the Hokkaido Shrine Association]. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shrine Association, 1999. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Hokkaido Shrine Association, ed. 北海道神社誌 [Hokkaido Shrine Gazetteer]. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shrine Association, 1971. Hokkaido Prefectural Library reference material
Hokkaido Shrine Association. 北海道神社史年表 [Chronology of Hokkaido Shrine History]. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shrine Association, 1956. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
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. Kokugakuin University Kokugakuin University
Jinja Honchō. 神社明細帳 [Shrine Detailed Registers], Hokkaido Records. ca. 1952–1953. Microfilm collection, Kokugakuin University Institute for Japanese Culture. Kokugakuin University collection description Kokugakuin University
Utashinai City History Compilation Committee, ed. 歌志内市史 [History of Utashinai City]. Utashinai: Utashinai City, 1964. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Utashinai City History Compilation Committee, ed. 新歌志内市史 [New History of Utashinai City]. Utashinai: Utashinai City, 1994. National Diet Library record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Ōtani, Masaharu. 雄別炭礦鉄道50年の軌跡 [Fifty Years of the Yūbetsu Coal Mine Railway]. 2nd enlarged ed. Japan: KS Kōsan, 1984. National Diet Library search record 国立国会図書館サーチ（NDLサーチ）
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. “石狩川の歴史 [History of the Ishikari River].” Japanese Rivers: Hokkaido, Ishikari River. Accessed September 28, 2026. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism MLIT
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. “石狩川の主な災害 [Major Disasters of the Ishikari River].” Japanese Rivers: Hokkaido, Ishikari River. Accessed September 28, 2026. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism MLIT
Hokkaido Regional Development Bureau, Sapporo Development and Construction Department. “開拓初期・洪水実績2 [Early Settlement Period: Flood Record 2].” 100 Years of Flood Control. Accessed September 28, 2026. Sapporo Development and Construction Department Ministry of Land and Infrastructure
Hokkaido Regional Development Bureau, Sapporo Development and Construction Department. “開拓初期: 石狩川上流域・洪水実績 [Early Settlement Period: Flooding in the Upper Ishikari River Basin].” 100 Years of Flood Control. Accessed September 28, 2026. Sapporo Development and Construction Department Ministry of Land and Infrastructure
Coal, Iron and Port Promotion Council. “赤平市 [Akabira City].” Coal, Iron and Port Heritage Portal. Accessed September 28, 2026. Coal, Iron and Port Heritage Portal 炭鉄港ポータルサイト
Hokkaido Shrine Association. “空知支部 [Sorachi Branch Shrines].” Hokkaido Shrine Association. Accessed September 28, 2026. Hokkaido Shrine Association