Tokumaru Kitano Shrine — 徳丸北野神社

In the Tokumaru district of Itabashi stands the oldest shrine in the ward, a shrine to Sugawara no Michizane founded over a thousand years ago after a red plum tree was credited with turning back a plague.

The shrine was founded in 995. The year before, when an epidemic swept the village, a stricken villager is said to have leaned against a red plum tree and prayed for the sickness to pass — and, recovering, the village invoked the Kitano Tenmangū of Kyoto, whose deity Sugawara no Michizane is bound to the plum. Known in the Edo period as the ‘Tenjinsha’ and serving as the tutelary shrine of Tokumaru village, it was renamed Kitano Shrine in 1873. An origin scroll, the Tenjingū-ki, was discovered in the old hall during rebuilding in 1963 and is the source of this account.

The shrine enshrines Sugawara no Michizane, worshipped as Tenjin, the god of learning — the scholar-statesman whose devotion to the plum tree gave the shrine its founding legend and its emblem.

Each year on 11 February the shrine performs the Tagasobi, a rice-field ritual of predictive theatre that mimes the coming year’s farming to ensure a good harvest. Together with the rite of the nearby Akatsuka Suwa Shrine, it was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan as the ‘Tagasobi of Itabashi’ in 1976.