Love-related shrine in southwestern Japan tipped as new local tourist campaign spot

June 28, 2013

Love-related shrine in southwestern Japan tipped as new local tourist campaign spot

Koinoki Shrine was just one of subordinates of the 800-year-old Mizuta Tenmangu Shrine in Chikugo City, Fukuoka Prefecture, southwestern Japan, but it is much better known than ever among young women longing for the appearance of good partners.

The shrine is located at a corner behind the main shrine with colored, heart-shaped stones buried around the hall of worship. The small shrine has been touted as the god of marriage and happiness over centuries, but it is charged with a different heavy task of helping boost the largely rural city with its power of love. Koinoki, which literally means the “tree of love,“ is dedicated to Koinomikoto, a fictitous figure which embodies an exiled ancient court official’s passion for his beloved ones left behind. Since there is no shrine of this kind across Japan, local people came to believe that Koinoki Shrine can be a main feature of their campaign of reactivating the city’s tourist business as well as the city as a whole. As a result, they launched the “Koi-Guru” (love gourmet) campaign in January this year while declaring the city as a “town of love.”

The city has prepared what it calls the Koi-Guru Pass”, a booklet introducing sweets, drinks and other gourmet products newly developed by local restaurants and food makers. Worshippers pay homage to the main shrine, where Sugawara Michizane, the exiled scholar-turned court official in the Heian peiod, is enshrined, and then go to the pink-colored shrine through an approach lined by display screens reading “Koi-Guru Pass Launched” and “Chikugo, the City of Love.” (A related story can be found in the post published on Jan. 28, 2013.)
Worshippers can draw “koi mikuji” sacred lots at the shrine and offer “ema” votive picture tablets with their wishes for love written. The tablets are hung in front of the hall of worship for a while so that the god can appreciate their wishes. The start of the campaign is expected to make the shrine's business busier, but local people hope that young people will visit the city more frequently and find their happiness at the shrine so that the city may also become happier and livelier.