Washinomiya, the Saitama shrine where anime pilgrimage quietly began

The torii at Washinomiya-jinja stands at the end of a low, unhurried sandō, and it has stood somewhere near here for longer than the records can carry. The shrine is said to be the oldest in the Kantō plain. Fifteen-odd years ago it acquired a second address, in the opening seconds of a 2007 anime called Lucky Star (らき☆すた, Raki Suta), and became the first pin on the map of modern anime pilgrimage.

The walk in from the station

Washinomiya Station (鷲宮駅) sits on the Tobu Isesaki Line, the stretch branded Tobu Skytree Line at the Tokyo end. From Asakusa it is a little under an hour by semi-express, and the fare runs to roughly 700 yen; most people change once at Kuki or Kita-senju and stop reading the platform signs long before they should. Out of the west exit you cross a quiet road, pass a coin laundry and a shuttered barber, and the sandō opens ahead — wide gravel, a row of half-lit shops, a vending machine humming to an empty street. The animators softened the angles and raised the blue of the sky, but the bones are exactly here, and the small gap between the drawing and the sidewalk is most of the reason anyone makes the trip.

What the shrine was before the frame

Washinomiya is the head of the Otori and Washi shrines of the Kantō region, and enshrines Amenohohi and Takemikazuchi among others. The grounds are old cedar and cold air, a long approach that empties onto the main hall without ceremony. On set dates through the year the shrine stages Washinomiya Saibara Kagura (催馬楽神楽), a masked ritual dance designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, performed on a raised open stage while a small crowd stands in the gravel below. None of this arrived with the anime. It is the reason the anime chose the place: an ordinary working shrine in a town most trains pass without slowing.

The ema rack reads like a guestbook

Near the hall the ema (絵馬) racks hang heavier than a rural shrine should warrant — the wooden votive plaques, a few hundred yen each, that pilgrims mark with a wish and leave behind. Here many are drawn edge to edge with characters, dated and signed, a practice fans call ita-ema (痛絵馬). Some carry the ordinary weight of any shrine: exam results, a sick parent, safe travel. Others simply thank a show for existing. The two hang side by side without apology, and the twins from the series, Kagami and Tsukasa Hiiragi, turn up again and again in ballpoint, because in the show their father keeps this shrine.

絵馬の波のなかに、神様への願いと、好きなキャラクターへの言葉が並んで掛かっている。

How a town agreed to be a destination

What makes Washinomiya unusual is that the town said yes. In 2007 the local chamber of commerce began stamping the characters onto senbei (煎餅, rice crackers) and onto bottles of local sake; the shrine accepted the fan-drawn ema as it would any plaque. The hatsumode count, the first-visit-of-the-year tally, tells the rest: from around 130,000 in early 2007 to some 300,000 the next January, and past 470,000 within a few years — one of the largest in Saitama, in a town of forty-odd thousand. Every autumn the Hajisai (土師祭) carried a fan-built mikoshi through the streets on local shoulders. This is the quiet machinery of seichi junrei (聖地巡礼), pilgrimage to a sacred place, working without anyone raising a voice.

The frame and the sidewalk simply learned to share an address.

Getting there, and when to go

Come on an ordinary weekday and you mostly find what was always here: an elderly couple bowing at the hall, a priest sweeping the path, the smell of wet cedar. The shrine grounds are open through daylight and cost nothing to enter; the shops on the sandō keep their own hours and several close by five, so an early afternoon suits it better than a late one. New Year is the one time to weigh carefully — the first three days of January draw the full hatsumode crush, and the walk from the station becomes a slow file. Bring cash. The one avoidable mistake is treating it as a theme park; it is a place people still pray, and the drawn version is a guest here, not the host.