Oyama Jinja Shrine

The Oyama Gate rises in three tiers: at its base, a wooden frame is hidden behind blocks of local Tomuro stone, while the upper part is made of plaster, carving, and colored glass. A lightning rod remains on the roof, considered the oldest in Japan. Beyond the gate begins the shrine where the founder of the Kanazawa ruling line and his wife are venerated. The gate was conceived as an invitation from the street to the stairs, which is why it looks so unlike familiar shrine gates.

In eighteen seventy-one, Kanaya Palace—the residence of the retired head of the Kaga Domain, the Maeda clan's holdings around Kanazawa—stood empty on this site. The domain was abolished, the Maeda clan left for Tokyo, and with them went the positions and incomes of thousands of samurai families.

Maeda Naonobu headed one of Kaga's eight senior service houses. He inherited an income of eleven thousand koku—koku being a measure of rice income—and held a high post in the domain administration. Now the former service no longer existed. Naonobu worked to establish a shrine to the clan's founder on the site of the empty palace.

He brought together former vassals and Kanazawa residents. In a petition to the prefecture, they wrote that the shrine at the foot of Mount Utatsu had fallen into extreme disrepair. They asked permission to buy the Kanaya land, transfer Maeda Toshiie, who was venerated there, to this site, and erect new buildings. Permission was granted. Oyama Jinja Shrine opened on November sixteenth, eighteen seventy-three; part of the dismantled palace was used in its construction. Naonobu, who had once overseen the affairs of the domain, became a shrine attendant.

Maeda Toshiie, who is venerated here, was a commander under Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the founder of the Kanazawa line of the Maeda clan. In fifteen eighty-three, he took Kanazawa Castle, and his descendants held Kaga for nearly three centuries.

The origin of his cult is connected with a story that the shrine itself passes down as a legend. After Toshiie's death in fifteen ninety-nine, his son Maeda Toshinaga supposedly feared openly deifying his father: the deceased had been close to Hideyoshi, while leadership of the country was passing to Tokugawa Ieyasu. Toshinaga transferred two old shrines—Hachiman Shrine and Shinmei Shrine—to Kanazawa and, under that pretext, established Utatsu Hachimangu Shrine by Mount Utatsu, where he secretly placed his father's spirit.

The risk to the family was very real. Soon Ieyasu suspected Toshinaga of conspiracy and began preparing a campaign against Kaga. To avoid war and preserve the domain, Toshinaga sent his mother Matsu to Edo as a hostage.

The documents, however, do not allow Toshiie's secret veneration to be confidently dated to that time. The seventeenth-century records of Utatsu Hachimangu Shrine name Hachiman Shrine, Shinmei Shrine, and the Buddhist healer Yakushi, but Toshiie is absent. Only in eighteen twenty-nine did a shrine attendant state that a sacred image of the clan founder was kept here, and obtain permission to conduct a memorial rite. The story of a cult concealed under a pretext therefore remains a shrine legend; what is reliably known is that by the nineteenth century Toshiie was already venerated at Utatsu and was transferred here from there.

The transfer still did not bring visitors to the shrine. Fewer people came than its organizers had expected. Hasegawa Junya, the head of the city district and a former samurai, proposed building a gate that would make passersby want to climb the stairs themselves. The local carpenter Tsuda Yoshinosuke was commissioned to create a sturdy structure without being required to follow old models.

In eighteen seventy-five, Tsuda completed the three-tiered gate. He assembled the frames of the lower arches from wood using Japanese carpentry techniques, then covered them with masonry of local Tomuro stone. Above came plaster, carved wooden details, and colored glass, while the roof received a lightning rod considered the oldest surviving one in Japan. Contemporaries called the gate excessively Western and even prepared plans to remake it, but it was not rebuilt.

At the main shrine, Toshiie and his wife Matsu are now venerated side by side; she was transferred here in nineteen ninety-eight. The secret shrine of the legend stood by Mount Utatsu. This site preserves details of Kanaya Palace and the gate through which Hasegawa intended to bring to Toshiie those who had previously walked past.