Ishiura Shrine

This guide to Ishiura Shrine in Kanazawa, said to be the city's oldest, opens with a question: finding a stone guardian dog flipped onto its back at the gate, would you expect the rest of the shrine to be this playful? It follows how priests, noticing pilgrims kept laughing at the overturned komainu, leaned into the joke instead of righting the statue, turning it into a mascot named Kimachan that now appears on amulets and prayer plaques. The guide also traces the tunnel of vermillion torii gates ahead, completed in 2019 for the start of the Reiwa era, and a local claim about the shape its two lanes trace from above. It closes on a shrine that would rather make you smile than make you solemn.