Ukiha Inari Shrine

This guide to Ukiha Inari Shrine follows a plan the Sankingumi group floated back in 1937 to turn this hillside above town into a public park, a plan the war put on hold for nearly two decades. It traces how five of the original men revived it in 1955, and how the project quietly picked up a shrine, with priests carrying sacred spirits here from Kyoto's Fushimi Inari in December 1957. You will hear about the roughly hundred stone haiku markers amateur poets once planted on the slope, several toppled by floodwater in 2012.