History

Before continuing I suggest reading this piece about Sugawara Michizane, the enshrined deity at this shrine, and the first person to be deified, as Tenman-Ōkami, in Japan.

Sometime between 1644 and 1647 a descendant of Sugawara Michizane, Sugawara Ōtoriishinsuke, a priest at the Dazaifu Tenman-gū, set out on a nationwide journey to propagate the Tenjin sect and build shrines. In 1661 he found himself at what was then Kamedo village in Edo where there was already a small Tenjin Jinja. He dedicated an image of Michizane engraved with the Flying Plum Tree (tobiume). This is now considered the origin of the present shrine.  The Flying Plum Tree is a reference to the legend of a plum tree in the garden of Michizane's house in Heian-kyō which he was very fond of and wrote poems about. This tree somehow learned about Michizane's death, uprooted itself and flew off to Kyūshū  where it can now be seen at the Dazaifu Tenman-gū.

Four years before this, in 1657, large parts of Edo had been virtually destroyed by the Grear Meireki Fire which raged for three days in late January of that year and the Tokugawa Bakufu was focusing its reconstruction efforts on the parts of the city comprising what is now Shitaya, Aakusa and  Fukagawa. As part of this effort the 4th Tokugawa Shogun donated the land on which Kamedo Tenjin now stands to be developed as a shrine and this work began in 1662. The shrine, modelled as it was on the Dazaifu Tenman-Gū, was probably initially called Higashi Dazai Tenman-Gū. In 1873 it was renamed Kamedo Jinja and in 1936 was given its current name of Kamedo Ten Jinja.

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