Kashima Jingu

Kashima Jingu enshrines Takemikazuchi, the thunder and sword deity who in the myths subdues the land and, in later belief, pins down the catfish whose thrashing causes earthquakes. It is one of the oldest shrines in eastern Japan, it gave the language the phrase kashima-dachi for setting out on a journey, and it holds a seventh-century straight sword that is a National Treasure.

What carries the visit is the ground itself. Behind the main hall a wide gravel path runs for several hundred metres under enormous cedars to an inner shrine, and off it lie the Kaname-ishi — a small exposed stone said to be the tip of a pillar driven into the earth to hold the catfish down — and the Mitarashi Pond, where roughly four hundred thousand litres of spring water rise each day into a pool clear enough to see the bottom of. It takes two hours to do properly and most visitors give it forty minutes.

Kashima Jingu's rank as one of only three shrines historically permitted to use the title jingu rather than the more common taisha or jinja (alongside Ise and Katori) reflects its unusually close ties to the imperial court and, later, to the samurai class, who venerated Takemikazuchi as a martial deity and patron of swordsmanship — several historically significant schools of Japanese swordsmanship trace their lineage back to teachings said to have originated at this shrine. That martial association sits alongside the older, folkloric layer of the catfish myth, which was less an abstract belief than a genuine framework people used to make sense of earthquakes in a seismically active country, and the Kaname-ishi stone is still visited today by people who take the earthquake-suppression tradition seriously rather than treating it purely as legend. The cedar avenue leading to the inner shrine is old-growth forest rather than planted landscaping, and the shrine's substantial landholdings historically kept loggers out of it, which is part of why the trees have been able to reach the scale they have.