Kasugataisha Shrine

This guide to Kasugataisha Shrine in Nara follows the Fujiwara family's thousand-year story of the thunder god Takemikazuchi, who rode a white deer from Kashima Shrine to guard the new capital, and the worship hall Empress Shotoku built for him in 768. It traces how that arrival made the local deer sacred and protected for roughly thirteen hundred years, and it walks the approach lined with nearly three thousand stone and bronze lanterns, lit together twice a year at Setsubun and in mid-August. Along the way it asks what it means for a shrine's buildings to be rebuilt every twenty years to the same measurements.