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Updated: June 26, 2025
The war god Hachiman, for example, to whom parish-temples are dedicated in almost every large city, is the apotheosized spirit of the Emperor Ojin, patron of the famed Minamoto clan. This is an example of Ujigami worship in which the clan-god is not an ancestor.
We find, as might be expected, that the temples now called Ujigami which is to say, Shinto parish-temples in general are always dedicated to a particular class of divinities, and never dedicated to certain other gods. Also, it is significant that in every large town there are Shinto temples dedicated to the same Uji-gods, proving the transfer of communal worship from its place of origin.
Buddhism, though widely accepted, brought no real change into this order of things; for, whatever Buddhist creed a commune might profess, the real social bond remained the bond of the Ujigami. So that, even as fully developed under the Tokugawa rule, Japanese society was still but a great aggregate of clans and subclans, kept together by military coercion.
If obliged to make a long journey, or to quit the district forever, the Ujiko pays a farewell visit to the Ujigami, as well as to the tombs of the family ancestors; and on returning to one's native place after prolonged absence, the first visit is to the god .... I have more than once been touched by the spectacle of soldiers at prayer before lonesome little temples in country places, soldiers but just returned from Korea, China, or Formosa: their first thought on reaching home was to utter their thanks to the god of their childhood, whom they believed to have guarded them in the hour of battle and the season of pestilence.
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.
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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