History

The antecedent of the current Naka-chō Hikawa Jinja seems to have been a small shrine, Moto-Miya, in a village called Ushida to the southeast of the current location. This shrine is said to have been set up during the Engi Era (901-923) but thereafter slowly fell into disuse and was abandoned for several centuries. In the early Edo Period, 1616 to be precise, a feudal lord, Ishide Yoshitane by name, from Tōtōmi Province, now the western part of Shizuoka-ken, built an embankment around land he was developing in what is now Kitasenju. This included the old Moto-Miya in Ushida, on the site of which a new shrine was built. The deity of the Musashi Province Ichinomiya Hikawa Jinja, Susano-o-no mikoto (57), was enshrined there through the bunrei process, and it is said that an effigy of Kannon which Ishide Yoshitane had brought from Tōtōmi was also worshipped there. Until the end of the Bakufu the shrine’s affairs were managed under the Betto-ji system by a temple, the Shirahata-yama Yakushiji Fudoin (白幡山薬師寺不動院), which can still be found at Senju 1-2-2.