Atsuta Shrine (Atsuta Jingu)

The reason for Atsuta's standing lies in a thing no one is permitted to look at. Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword, is enshrined here as the shintai, the physical vessel of the deity, and is not displayed to worshippers, to visiting officials, or even to the shrine's own priests. There is no viewing on any anniversary and no photograph; what pilgrims approach is the closed honden behind its fence.

The one near-contemporary account of anyone glimpsing it, recorded in an Edo-period document, describes priests who broke the taboo and were said to have fallen ill, a story that only hardened the prohibition. This restraint is deliberate and respectful rather than secretive for its own sake: in Shinto the object's power is bound up with its concealment, and the imperial regalia in particular are understood to be handled by almost no one across an entire reign. The Kusanagi-kan museum, opened in 2021, satisfies visitors' curiosity about swords by showing the shrine's large collection of other blades, while the regalia sword itself remains, as it has for centuries, unseen.

The sword's mythology is told in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the two eighth-century chronicles that underpin Shinto. The storm god Susanoo, banished from heaven, slays the eight-forked serpent Yamata-no-Orochi and finds a blade in its tail, which he offers to his sister the sun goddess Amaterasu. Generations later the sword is entrusted to the warrior-prince Yamato Takeru; ambushed in a burning field, he cuts down the grass around him and turns the fire back on his enemies, and the blade takes the name Kusanagi, grass-cutter.

When Yamato Takeru dies, his consort Miyasuhime enshrines the sword at Atsuta, which tradition dates to the reign of Emperor Keiko. Whatever the legendary chronology, the point is theological: together with the mirror kept at Ise and the jewel at the imperial palace, the sword is one of the Three Sacred Treasures, the regalia whose possession marks the legitimate sovereign. Atsuta is thus not merely a famous shrine but the keeper of a symbol of the state itself.

For all its antiquity Atsuta is a busy urban shrine, its 190,000-square-metre forest an island of green in southern Nagoya that draws close to nine million visitors a year, with the largest crowds at the New Year hatsumode. More than seventy rites are performed annually; the chief festival, the Rei Sai on 5 June, fills the grounds with offerings and martial-arts displays. The precinct also carries its own layers of history: the Nobunaga-bei, a roofed earthen wall some seven metres high, was given by Oda Nobunaga in 1560 in thanks for his victory at nearby Okehazama, and survives as one of Japan's three great historic walls.

The shrine's treasure hall holds well over four thousand objects, including a nationally designated collection of swords and mirrors that reflect Atsuta's long association with the smith's craft. Rebuilt in 1935 in the pure Shinmei style shared with Ise and restored again after the Second World War, the halls present a deliberately plain, unpainted cypress architecture that expresses the aesthetic of the oldest Shinto shrines.