Sukunabikona in Doshomachi: A Living Shrine of Medicine

Sukunabikona's standing as actively venerated in a living tradition takes a specific, occupational form. Sukunahikona Shrine sits in Doshomachi, the historic pharmaceutical wholesalers' district of Osaka, a neighborhood that has traded in medicine since the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate gave its merchants the privilege of inspecting and pricing every medicine sold nationwide, imported or domestic. The shrine, established in the ninth century, enshrines Sukunabikona alongside Shinno, the Chinese god of medicine, pairing Japan's own medicine kami with the tradition his role as healer and teacher of remedies already connects him to. The shrine's standing is renewed every year rather than left as history. Its annual Shinnosai festival, held on the fixed dates of November 22 and 23, closes out Osaka's calendar of yearly festivals; worshippers crowd Doshomachi Street among food stalls and lantern displays seeking papier mache tiger charms called shinko, amulets for warding off illness and securing good health, a tradition rooted in the historical use of tiger bone in Japanese and Chinese medicine. The festival's own name for itself, the concluding festival of the year, marks Sukunabikona's cult as neither dormant nor merely commemorative but as the still functioning ritual center of a real medicine trading district.