You hand over a hundred yen for five small clay balls, aim left-handed or right-handed depending on your sex, and throw them at a rock shaped like a turtle. That is not the strange part. The strange part is where you are standing when you do it.
The approach starts ordinarily enough: a torii gate, a car park, souvenir stalls selling the same egg-shaped buns everyone in the group ahead of you is already eating. Then the path bends toward the coast and starts going down — down a staircase cut into a cliff, past a railing, with the Pacific suddenly loud and close on your left and a wall of striped rock curving away on your right.
The stripes are not paint. They are centuries of sandstone and mudstone laid down one thin band at a time, stacked and tilted until they look, from a boat, exactly like the ridges of a washboard. Locals call the whole formation Oni no Sentakuita — the Devil's Washboard — and once someone points it out, you will not be able to stop seeing it.
At the bottom of the stairs, tucked into a hollow in the cliff face where no architect would ever choose to put a building, is the shrine itself: a small vermilion hall wedged directly into the mouth of a sea cave, waves close enough to hear over the sound of your own footsteps on the stone.
Udo Jingu first enters the historical record in 782, when a monk named Kaikyū built a Buddhist temple on the site specifically to maintain the shrine that was apparently already there and already old. The Edo-period lords of the nearby Obi domain, the Itō clan, took over as its patrons, and in 1711 they rebuilt the main hall that still stands in the cave today. For well over a thousand years, in other words, people have been coming down this exact cliff for the exact reason you are about to.
The reason is a birth story. The shrine's principal deity is Ugayafukiaezu, who in Japanese mythology is the father of Emperor Jimmu, the legendary first emperor of Japan. Ugayafukiaezu's mother was Toyotama-hime, a daughter of the sea god, who came ashore from the Palace of the Sea God to give birth inside this cave — carried, locals will tell you, on the back of a giant sea turtle that turned to stone the moment it delivered her safely to land. That stone turtle is still there, a low dark rock in front of the hall, worn smooth by a few hundred years of people trying to hit it.
The part of the legend that gets told quietest, but is the one that stays with you, involves what happened next. Toyotama-hime had promised her husband she would not be seen in her true sea-dragon form while giving birth, and when he broke that promise and looked anyway, she fled back into the ocean, leaving her newborn son behind in the cave. Before she went, grief-stricken, she pressed her breasts against the cave wall so that milk would keep flowing for the infant she could no longer nurse. Inside the hall today, two breast-shaped formations on the rock — Ochichi-iwa — still have water seeping from them, and the shrine sells small candies, said to be modeled on that milk, that pilgrims have historically bought for nursing mothers and safe childbirth.
Then there is the throw. Just outside the hall, visitors buy undama — small unglazed clay balls, traditionally five for a hundred yen — and aim them at a shallow depression on top of the turtle rock below. Custom has men throwing left-handed and women right-handed, making a silent wish in the instant before the ball leaves the hand. Land one in the hollow and the wish is supposed to come true. Miss, and you simply buy five more, which is either very good or very bad business depending on how you choose to look at a religious ritual.
In 2017 the Japanese government designated the cliffs around the shrine a National Scenic Spot, citing both the mythology and the geology — the striped rock is now reckoned to be at least eight million years old, laid down as deep-sea sediment long before there was a Japan for a god to be born into. The shrine is free to enter, open from six or seven in the morning depending on the season until seven at night, and gets heaviest for New Year's visits and for couples, since Udo Jingu has a long-standing reputation as a spot for matchmaking and marital luck — Ugayafukiaezu's own parents, after all, met across the entire boundary between the sea and the land.
Nearly every famous shrine in Japan asks you to climb: a mountain, a hillside, a long flight of steps that puts the sacred thing above you and closer to the sky. Udo Jingu does the opposite on purpose. Its holiest point is the lowest one on the whole site, a cave at sea level that the tide could reach, built for a goddess who came not from the heavens but up out of the ocean. Most shrines locate the sacred by making you look up. This one locates it by making you walk all the way down to where the land runs out — because in the story this shrine is built around, that is exactly where the gods actually were.
- The shrine is first recorded in 782, when the monk Kaikyū built a temple to maintain it; the current cave hall was rebuilt in 1711 under the patronage of the Itō lords of Obi domain.
- The striped cliffs around the shrine, known locally as Oni no Sentakuita (the Devil's Washboard), are sandstone-and-mudstone sediment at least eight million years old, and were made a National Scenic Spot in 2017.
- The enshrined deity, Ugayafukiaezu, is said in Japanese mythology to be the father of Emperor Jimmu, Japan's legendary first emperor — meaning the imperial line, by this story, starts at the bottom of this cliff rather than at the top of any mountain.
Getting there
From JR Miyazaki Station, take the JR Nichinan Line (around 50 minutes; trains are infrequent, so check the timetable rather than assume one) to Ibii or Aburatsu Station, then a local bus toward Udo Jingu (about 20 minutes) to the "Udo Jingu" stop, followed by a 10-minute walk to the entrance. A direct bus also runs from Miyazaki Station or Miyazaki Airport, roughly 60 to 90 minutes depending on the service. By car it is about 50 minutes from Miyazaki IC, with a large car park near the entrance. Entry is free; the shrine is open 6:00–19:00 from April to September and 7:00–19:00 from October to March.