Wadatsumi-no-miya: The Dragon Moved Upstairs

A palace, read differently

To a Japanese reader, the name on the banners looks familiar. Its two characters are normally read Ryūgū: the Dragon Palace under the sea, where the fisherman Urashima Tarō spends what feels like a short, pleasant stay in the folk tale, then returns home to find everyone he knew long gone.

Here, the same characters are read Wadatsumi-no-miya. Wadatsumi is an old name for the god of the sea. The deity enshrined here is the Great God of the Dragon Palace.

According to Enoshima Shrine, a dragon god has lived on the island ever since it rose out of the sea, and dragon worship here has long been bound up with the worship of Benzaiten, the goddess the island is best known for.

The legend begins in 552. A five-headed dragon living in a lake in what is now Kamakura was bringing down mountains and sending floods and storms. Then the earth shook, a heavenly maiden came down from the sky, and when the clouds cleared, there was an island where there had only been sea. The maiden came to be identified with Benzaiten.

The dragon proposed. She turned him down on account of his record. He promised to mend his ways and began making himself useful.

The address downstairs

The rocks are not only for show. Directly beneath the shrine is the Iwaya, a pair of caves worn into the island’s cliffs by the sea. According to Enoshima Shrine, this is where the island’s worship of Benzaiten began, and the caves were once the shrine’s main sanctuary.

They were not always dry. Because seawater came into the caves in summer, the shrine says, the deity of the caves used to be moved up the hill from the fourth to the tenth month of the old calendar, to a temporary home where Okutsumiya now stands.

In 1971, a rockfall closed the caves. They stayed shut for 22 years. In 1993, after surveys and repairs, they reopened as a paid attraction.

That same year, devotees paid for a new shrine on the hill directly above them.

These days, the dragon lives upstairs all year round.

Behind the shutter

Up here, the cave has been built to order. Boulders are piled into a small hill, and a long slab of stone forms the lintel over the entrance. Inside, the old Iwaya is said to have been recreated, along with a shrine similar to the one that once stood in the caves below.