Akagi-jinja Shrine and Akagi-yama Hill | kokosil Nagareyama-Honcho - Edo-style path

Akagi-yama Hill is a very small hill shaped like an upside-down bowl, and Akagi-jinja Shrine stands on top of it. This place holds old legends of how the region name of 'Nagareyama' came to be.

According to the inscription on a stone monument at Akagi-jinja Shrine, Mt. Akagi-yama in Jōshū (modern-day Gunma Prefecture) erupted, causing a landslide that reached all the way to this region. This legend claims that the name 'Nagareyama,' literally 'flowing mountain' in Japanese, was derived from this event. According to another legend, the region was given this name because a protective Shinto talisman flowed here from Mt. Akagi-yama.

During the Edo Period, Akagi-jinja Shrine was designated with the highest rank given to a shrine. A traditional gate called a torii is found at the entrance to Japanese Shinto shrines, marking the transition from the mundane to the sacred.

Every year, Akagi-jinja Shrine's torii is decorated with an enormous, 6.5-meter-long shimenawa, or decorative rope, that weighs approximately 500kg. This rope is woven in a single day through a cooperative effort between the shrine's regular visitors and the local residents. The weaving of the shimenawa, which has been designated by Nagareyama City as one of its intangible folk cultural properties, is performed on the day before the festival that is held on the third weekend in October.