*Please be careful. The path to the shrine is narrow and dangerous. There was an accident last year where a car fell into the river when trying to go there. Be sure to park your car and proceed on foot. It is forbidden to enter by car.

When Ryotaro Shiba went Sado, there was somewhere he wanted to go by all means: the Atsukushihiko Jinja Shrine.

At the time, even the locals barely knew about this shrine, but it’s a shrine with lots of history to it and is even noted in the Heian Period’s records known as the Engishiki. Across the fields, there’s a thick forest without any paths to the shrine or visible buildings. If you continue along the path between the rice fields, a shrine will appear before you as if it’d been hidden there. Next to it is a decaying Noh stage.

Shiba’s imagination flourished when he looked at his map again. He began considering a certain possibility. Just as the name of the area, Choko, suggested, in the time before Lake Kamo was a lake, this could have been an inlet, a seashore, or a coastline.

Furthermore, there was a passage in the Chronicles of Japan that may have supported this.
“In the past, a tribe from a different country may have washed up on the shores of Sado. The people of the island called them demons and kept their distance. Eventually, this tribe began living along the inlet. They fished for a living, but the divine power in that inlet had always been powerful. It was a place that the islanders couldn’t approach. The tribe had no clue about this and half of them lost their lives as they drank the water.”

Shima discovered that he’d discovered that inlet and hypothesized that this shrine may have been one built to worship the very same, frightening god. Of course, there was no such story passed down to the local people. But as you stand here, think about what you feel from the shrine.

The decaying Noh stage has not been used since the Taisho Era, but it will be used during the Arts Festival once more for a Noh play. The voices from the play on the stage may echo into the past, calling forth memories long lost to this land.