Negoroji —
the temple that keeps a monster's horn.

根香寺 Negoroji · Temple 82 · Mount Aomine, Takamatsu, Kagawa

The hunt

These mountains were troubled by a creature called the 牛鬼 Ushioni, the ox-demon. In the early seventeenth century an archer named Yamada Kurando Takakiyo went up after it, waited, and brought it down with an arrow.

He cut off a horn and brought it to Negoroji as an offering. The temple took the body in and performed the rites for it. The horn is kept here.

That last part is worth stopping over. The monster was not destroyed and forgotten. It was buried, prayed for, and its remains were taken into a temple.

In this tradition, something that has caused harm is not simply the enemy. It is also something that suffers, and something that can be laid to rest. That is what this place is actually about — and it is not how most cultures finish a story like this one.

The temple

Negoroji sits high on Mount Aomine in deep forest, laid out unusually: you walk down into the main hall rather than up to it. The principal image is a Thousand-Armed Kannon.

Around the inner hall runs a corridor lined with hundreds of small Kannon figures, donated one by one over generations. Walking it slowly, in the half-dark, is a practice in itself — and almost nobody does it slowly.

In late autumn the maples here turn so completely that people come across the island for them.

Going there

On the Goshikidai plateau above Takamatsu, with Temple 81 Shiromineji a walk away along the old pilgrim path. Doing both in one day, on foot, is the way to do it.