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Updated: May 19, 2025
What the household shrine represented to the family, the Shinto parish-temple represented to the community; and the deity there worshipped as tutelar god was called Ujigami, the god of the Uji, which term originally signified the patriarchal family or gens, as well as the family name. Some obscurity still attaches to the question of the original relation of the community to the Uji-god.
The Shinto parish-temple has an intimate relation to the life of the community as a body, and also to the individual existence of every Ujiko.
How can the men who win distinction as scientific specialists still respect the household shrine or do reverence before the Shinto parish-temple? Can all this mean more than the ordered conservation of forms after the departure of faith? Is it not certain that with the further progress of education, Shinto, even as ceremonialism, must cease to exist?
They had come to town for the matsuri of our own ujigami, or parish-temple; and, as there were many curious things to be seen at the night festival, we started for the temple after dark, Kinjuro carrying a paper lantern painted with my crest.
Another fact worth observing is that the Ujigami temple is not necessarily the most important Shinto temple in the parish: it is the parish-temple, and important to the communal worship; but it may be outranked and overshadowed by some adjacent temple dedicated to higher Shinto gods.
Every such parish-temple has its holy days, when all Ujiko are expected to visit the temple, and when, as a matter of fact, every household sends at least one representative to the Ujigami. There are great festival-days and ordinary festival-days; there are processions, music, dancing, and whatever in the way of popular amusement can serve to make the occasion attractive.
Thus in Kitzuki of Izumo, for example, the great Izumo temple is not the Ujigami, not the parish-temple; the local cult is maintained at a much smaller temple .... Of the higher cults I shall speak further on; for the present let us consider only the communal cult, in its relation to communal life.
What queer weird attraction in those parish-temple festivals, with their happy mingling of merriment and devotion in the presence of the gods!
By degrees the ghost-house of the uji-no-kami became transformed into the modern Shinto parish-temple; and the ancestral spirit became the local tutelar god, whose modern appellation, ujigami, is but a shortened form of his ancient title, uji-no-kami.
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