This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 901, Fujiwara no Tokihira accused Sugawara no Michizane before the throne of plotting to depose the emperor, a charge that ended his career at the height of his standing as Minister of the Right. Michizane was stripped of his rank and sent to Dazaifu in Kyushu as a nominal governor general, a posting that carried no real authority and no permission to return to the capital.
He spent his last two years at Dazaifu in poverty, far from the Heian court where he had once rivaled the Fujiwara regents on the strength of his scholarship alone. Even stripped of rank and authority, he continued writing, producing poetry from exile that later readers preserved alongside the classical Chinese composition of his earlier career. He died there in 903, at the age of fifty eight, never permitted to return to the court he had served for most of his adult life.
Michizane's death in disgraced exile did not end his significance. The manner of his fall, an accusation brought by a rival power he had threatened through merit rather than birth, became central to how later generations remembered him, feeding the belief that his angry spirit required appeasement and eventually producing the shrine cult built around him after his death, a cult that transformed the exiled minister into a venerated deity of scholarship still invoked by students today.