Toyotomi Hideyoshi / Hokoku Shrine / Japanese Toka Ebisu Festival

I visited "Toka Ebisu Festival". 

This festival is held at Hokoku Shrine in Nagahama City, Shiga Prefecture on January 9th, 10th and 11th every year.

Ebisu is Japanese god of luck and good fortune.

Hokoku Shrine was built by townspeople in Nagahama who worshiped and missed Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536~1598) for the third anniversary of Hideyoshi’s death. 

Hideyoshi was a lord and chief imperial minister.

In the Edo Period (1603 - 1867), Tokugawa shogunate (the government at that time) did not like the fact that townspeople still worshiped and followed Hideyoshi even after his death.

Therefore, the government forbade beliefs in Hideyoshi and destroyed the shrine!!!

 

Town's people must had been devastated… No!!　(only they know how much that hurt them though...)

Actually, they destroyed the shrine but it did not destroy their beliefs, they moved the deity from the destroyed shrine to a house.

And after that, they placed the deity into a Ebisu (Japanese god of luck and good fortune) shrine.

They secretly kept worshiping Hideyoshi and praying for him in the back of the shrine.

Finally, on the 300th anniversary of his death in 1989, the shrine was rebuilt.

This is how Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Ebisu God have been connected for a long time.

 

To worship someone and or something, or to love and think of someone and or something,

it creates or makes us realize something almost like a miracle.

 

 

T.F