Kyoto's Great Summer Festival Traces to Him: Susanoo at Yasaka Shrine

Susanoo's disgrace in myth stands in sharp contrast to the scale of his living cult. He is the chief kami of Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto's Gion district, formerly called Gion Shrine, where he is enshrined alongside his wife Kushinada hime and eight child deities, and the shrine remains one of the most visited in Japan. The Gion tradition of worship historically centered on a distinct deity, Gozu Tenno, a syncretic figure blending Shinto and Buddhist elements, and it was the Meiji era policy separating Buddhism from Shinto that formally reoriented Gion worship around Susanoo as its central kami. Kyoto's Gion Matsuri, one of Japan's largest and most famous annual festivals, traces its origins to this same cult and continues to draw enormous crowds each July. Beyond Kyoto, major shrines dedicated to Susanoo include Hiromine Shrine in Hyogo Prefecture and Tsushima Shrine in Aichi Prefecture, both historically linked to the Gion tradition, along with shrines in the Izumo region of his mythological exile itself. Few kami show as wide a gap between a myth of expulsion and the scale of the worship a community actually built around them. The shrine's connection to Izumo, the very region of Susanoo's mythical exile and his slaying of the serpent, gives his cult an unusually direct link between the geography of the myth and the geography of ongoing worship, a continuity many kami with more heavenly origin stories do not share.