Yatagarasu Shrine — 八咫烏神社

In the hills of Uda in Nara stands Yatagarasu Shrine — by tradition the first shrine in Japan to enshrine the three-legged crow Yatagarasu, the divine guide of the first emperor, as a deity in its own right.

The Shoku Nihongi records the enshrinement of a Yatagarasu shrine in 705, in the reign of Emperor Monmu, and this is taken as the shrine’s founding — the earliest record of the crow worshipped as a god. Revered as a deity of war, the shrine flourished under the devotion of Emperor Go-Daigo in the fourteenth century, then fell to the edge of ruin amid the wars that followed. It was revived in the Bunsei era of the Edo period through the efforts of a priest of the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto, and its main hall was rebuilt at that time in the Kasuga-zukuri style; the old stone sanctuary survives beside it.

The shrine enshrines Kamotaketsunumi-no-mikoto, who appears in legend as the great crow Yatagarasu. It is for his guidance of the first emperor’s army that he was honoured here, from ancient times, as a god of war.

According to the Shinsen Shōjiroku, when Emperor Jimmu marched east to claim the land of Yamato, his army was halted deep in the mountains of Kumano. There Kamotaketsunumi took the form of Yatagarasu, the three-legged crow, and led the host out of the wilderness to Yamato, securing the victory — and from that deed the shrine’s reverence for him as a guardian of armies springs.