Furuichi

Furuichi is a historic district straddling the old pilgrimage road that connects the Geku and Naiku, the two main shrines of Ise Jingu. Today a quiet residential area, it was for centuries one of the most famous and boisterous places in all of Japan, a pleasure quarter so celebrated that it was ranked among the three greatest in the country alongside the entertainment districts of Edo and Osaka. Its story reveals a fascinating and often overlooked side of Ise pilgrimage, where devotion and revelry went hand in hand.

During the Edo period the road between the Outer and Inner Shrines passed over a rise at Furuichi, and here, at the natural resting point of the journey, an enormous entertainment quarter grew up to serve the pilgrims. At its height Furuichi is said to have boasted dozens of inns, theatres, teahouses and establishments of pleasure, employing hundreds of women and entertainers. Pilgrims who had come to purify their souls at the shrines would, by long tradition, indulge themselves at Furuichi before or after their prayers, a custom captured in the wry saying that one went to Ise to worship and to Furuichi to play. The district gave its name to a genre of comic performance and features in Edo-period literature and woodblock prints.

The quarter was also the birthplace of the Ise Ondo, a lively folk dance and song tradition performed in its banqueting houses, which spread across Japan and remains part of the region's cultural heritage. A notorious historical incident, a bloody sword rampage in a Furuichi teahouse in 1796, even became the subject of a famous kabuki play, sealing the district's place in the popular imagination.

With the coming of railways and the decline of foot pilgrimage in the modern era, Furuichi's fortunes faded, and today little of its former grandeur survives in the built environment; the area is largely quiet and residential. Yet traces remain for those who look, and the small Ise Furuichi Sangu Kaido Museum tells the story of the pilgrimage road and its riotous heyday, displaying artefacts, models and prints that bring the vanished quarter vividly to life.

For travellers, Furuichi is less a place of spectacular sights than of atmosphere and imagination, best appreciated by walking a stretch of the historic road that pilgrims once trod between the shrines and picturing the lantern-lit revelry that once filled these now-peaceful streets. The gentle uphill route, the old markers and the museum together evoke a lost world.

Situated conveniently on the route between the Geku and Naiku, Furuichi is easily incorporated into a walking itinerary linking the two shrines, and costs nothing to explore. For those curious about the full human story of Ise pilgrimage, in all its mixture of piety and pleasure, this faded but storied quarter adds an unexpectedly colourful and very human chapter.