How one of the country’s largest Shinto shrines ended up in tiny Granite Falls

THE LARGEST AND most active Shinto shrine in the mainland United States, and arguably the North American continent, is not in Seattle.

Nor is it in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose or any other city with a substantial Japanese American population. In fact, none of those cities — with the exception of a mobile shrine in L.A., plus a yearslong fundraising campaign to find it a permanent home — appears to have any major, active Shinto structures at all.

Instead, the spellbinding Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America is hidden away, on 25 acres snuggled in the cedar-thick forests of Snohomish County just outside the town of Granite Falls: population 4,700.

Which, at first, seems a little strange.

Shinto, often described as “the indigenous religion of Japan,” predates Buddhism on those islands by perhaps 1,000 years — and remains, according to the Japanese government, the country’s prevailing spiritual practice.

A 2019 report by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs counted 88.9 million practitioners of Shinto, with Buddhism running a close second (84.8 million) and Christianity a distant third (1.9 million).

Shinto officials at Japan’s Jinja Honchō (Association of Shinto Shrines) reckon the country has around 80,000 public shrines. In the United States, there are maybe a dozen — most of them in Hawaii, where Shinto began arriving with early Japanese immigrants in the late 1860s.

“Hundreds of Buddhist temples existed in the U.S. before World War II, and hundreds exist today,” says Duncan Ryūken Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California and a Soto Zen priest, whose research includes the history of Buddhism and Shinto in the United States. “But formal shrines were very uncommon in North America.”

They still are.

How an active, contemporary Shinto shrine came to be in Granite Falls, and why there aren’t major American shrines in places like San Francisco, or pretty much anywhere outside Hawaii, is a story with two tracks: the first about an inspired American who became one of history’s first ordained, non-Japanese Shinto priests; the second about immigration, a war and how some spiritual practices travel better than others.

Perhaps oddly, though both tracks involve Shinto — with its strong emphasis on life cycles and interconnection — they barely intersect.

THE FINAL LEG of the drive to Tsubaki Grand Shrine is a cram session in American spiritual diversity.

Cruising up State Route 92, roughly an hour northeast of Seattle, takes you past an understated Catholic church; a brightly painted Khmer Buddhist temple; and the evangelical Cornerstone church, whose readerboard, in April, announced: “Online tickets still available for the End of Days Conference.”

But all evidence of neighbors and their Armageddons evaporates once you’ve pulled off the main road onto a smaller one, then through a wooden torii (the iconic Japanese-style gate) and stepped out of your car to smell the air. Crisp and fresh, but thick with scents: trees, soil, lichens, slow and organic growth, vegetal decomposition. Life and death, intermingled.

Crunching down the gravel path is like entering a world unto itself. Sword ferns reach out in all directions. Cedar branches hang shaggy with moss. On a sunny day, all these growing things have a stained-glass effect, tinting the light greenish. At first it seems silent — no cars! — but then there’s sound. It’s the Pilchuck River, hugging the shrine grounds in a little curve, burbling through the trees.

Walking past the haiden (the main shrine hall) onto a stony beach, the burbling takes on different tones: a gently higher pitch in the shallows to your left, something lower as the riverbed deepens to your right. On the opposite bank, a steep stone wall drops into a patch of water that looks strangely calm for a river.

“That’s a deep-water pool, a cool refuge for the migrating salmon,” says Rev. Lawrence Koichi Barrish, the 73-year-old Shinto priest and longtime aikido instructor who — with the blessing of his teachers in Japan — began building the first iteration of this shrine in 1990. “Even the fish come to this place to relax and be rejuvenated on their life’s journey.”

For decades, Barrish has performed daily, early-morning misogi — ceremonial cold-water immersion, with accompanying physical and spiritual exercises — in the river. And the distinct sound of the Pilchuck at this bend in its course was instrumental to the founding of the shrine.

In February 1990, Barrish was on one of his periodic, weekslong residencies at Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Japan’s Mie Prefecture (said to have been established in 3 B.C.E.), performing regular predawn misogi at its sacred waterfall.

“On the day I was going to return to America, there was so much cold and ice, an amazing day,” Barrish says. “During the silent meditation period, listening to the waterfall, I thought: ‘We should have a shrine where we can hear the movement of water. If such a place manifests without me doing anything to manipulate the situation, I’ll call it Kannagara, which means divine flowing.’ ”

Shortly after Barrish’s return to the U.S., he had just gotten home from teaching an aikido class in Everett when the phone rang. It was one of his students, who had a plot of land near Granite Falls that he and his wife wanted to show the sensei. A few days later, Barrish visited. The river, he says, sounded just like that waterfall.

Kannagara had found its home.

LIKE ALL MILLENNIA-OLD human endeavors, Shinto has seen changes. But some fundamentals remain.

Shinto has no founder, Jesus or Buddha figure, but pays homage to divine beings or forces called Kami — often found in natural features (special trees, waterfalls, rocks or mountains), but not always. Human-made objects, supernatural entities, even the spirits of some people after death can be, or house, Kami.

Archaeological evidence from around 300 B.C.E. suggests an early version of Shinto focused on the seasonal rhythms of rice cultivation, and the marking-off of sacred objects or places where Kami were invited to descend. Despite its ancient origins, the practice remains a vital and living influence: the disciplined, Shinto-inflected aesthetics of Marie Kondo (the icon of decluttering served as a miko, or Shinto shrine maiden, in her young adulthood); Shinto-esque undercurrents in the films of Hayao Miyazaki (“My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away”); and popular shrine visits for important calendrical or life events.

Over the course of 2013, for example, the Japanese city of Ise reported that 14.2 million people (more than 10% of Japan’s total population) visited its ancient shrine complex for an important anniversary. Barrish estimates around 4,000 people attended Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America’s most recent New Year ceremony. For many Shinto observers, showing up is the thing — and theology sometimes takes a back seat to practice.

“We often say Shinto is not a religion, but an original, natural spirituality,” Barrish explains. “Every culture at one time had something like Shinto, which is quite distinct from a revealed religion like Buddhism or Christianity. In most instances, the original spirituality of a place gives a strong flavor or subtext to the revealed religion that comes later. Christianity in Europe is flavored by natural spirituality, with its sacred sites, practices and holidays.” (Easter eggs, door-to-door Christmas caroling, etc.)

Likewise, Shinto became tightly interwoven with Buddhism once it arrived from Korea in the 6th century C.E.

There have been attempts to separate them, including a big push during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, when the Japanese government established State Shinto (later abolished, after World War II). But according to the 2019 Agency for Cultural Affairs report, many Japanese people continue to practice Buddhism and Shinto in tandem.

BARRISH INITIALLY WAS DRAWN to Shinto in the 1960s, after he began training in aikido — a martial art whose founder was, as Barrish describes him, “a Shinto mystic” — with a prickly Japanese instructor in Southern California. For Barrish, Shinto and aikido’s focus on life force and energy (ki) rang a deep bell.

“Even as a child, I felt strongly that each blade of grass, each tree leaf, was really true to its own nature, but that most people were kind of goofy and not so much true expressions of their inner nature,” Barrish says. “Obviously, I was a very weird kid. But it troubled me. I lost sleep over it — and that puzzle became the impetus for a lot of things that followed.”

Eventually, Barrish became an international aikido instructor and ardent Shinto student, making several trips to Japan each year for intensive study with the priests at Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Mie. At first, they said he’d never be ordained: He wasn’t Japanese. After some internal deliberation, Barrish says, they changed course, and in 1993 began training him for the rank of negi, or senior priest.

Earlier, during the 1980s, Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Mie had established an affiliate shrine in California, but in 2001 decided to move it to Granite Falls: Barrish had become a Shinto priest, and Kannagara became Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America.

“Now, of course, a lot of people find us through the internet,” Barrish says, many of them non-Japanese. “We’re popular for Japanese people in the Pacific Northwest who use us just as they’d use a local shrine in Japan — but not many Japanese Americans.”

Which raises a question: Why not?

THE DIRE DAYS OF WWII, with their intense racism and cultural stigmas, partly explain that absence — but not all of it.

Even back in the 1800s, Shinto simply didn’t travel as readily as Buddhism. While the 80,000 Shinto shrines in Japan were (and are) an integral part of the community fabric, they remain tied to a specific sense of place.

“Each shrine was meant to be for that locality, therefore not transferrable to a different region of Japan, let alone across the Pacific,” says Williams, the professor at USC. “Buddhism, on the other hand, is very transportable. It went from India to Tibet, China, Korea, Japan — a long history of being transported, transplanted, getting new cultural roots in each place.”

For Buddhism, North America became another stop on the long road.

Hawaii is a small exception. Shinto shrines proliferated there, Williams says, because groups of early immigrants came from the same regions of Japan, bringing local practices. That didn’t work in the more diffuse cities of mainland North America.

Then came the war, the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans — two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — and the official suppression of Shinto.

“In the week after Pearl Harbor, 100% of Shinto priests were rounded up, about 75% of Buddhist priests were picked up and 17% of Christian pastors were picked up,” Williams says. “There was a hierarchy of who they considered more or less dangerous.”

Which indicates a clumsy understanding of the situation.

Before WWII, Shinto had three branches: traditional shrine Shinto (dating back millennia); State Shinto (developed during the 19th century and allied with the Japanese government during WWII); and new, Shinto-inspired sects (which also emerged during the 19th century).

If traditional shrine Shinto was already rare in North America, State Shinto was practically (or entirely) nonexistent — but the U.S. government did not recognize these distinctions. The priests were arrested and deported.

Letters from the camps indicate that some Shinto practices survived there, even without priests, but largely faded from view in the postwar era. People began shying away from Japanese names, foods, clothing — anything that would mark them as potentially “un-American.”

“The government, the media, the general public had a presumption that the U.S. was essentially a white, Christian nation,” Williams says. “Unsurprisingly, some people thought they can’t change their race, but becoming Christian would send a signal: ‘We’re American.’ ”

Williams, however, cautions against conflating the absence of Shinto shrines and priests with the wholesale absence of Shinto — which can be quietly observed on a personal basis, sometimes with small, shrinelike altars at home.

How prevalent were those private practices?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know how we would establish that.”

WHEN GABRIELLE NOMURA GAINOR was growing up in Seattle, her family took regular road trips to visit cousins in Los Angeles. Every time they hit Northern California, she says, her grandfather would stop at Mount Shasta to greet the mountain. There was never much explaining why.

“It was very matter-of-fact, just, ‘This is what we do,’ ” she says. “Maybe that’s part of Shinto, but it’s also very Japanese-y. They sometimes apologize to insects before they build a building. How much of that is, ‘This is formal, capital-S Shinto,’ and how much of it is just Shinto-y? Where does the religious or spiritual element stop and the cultural part begin?”

It’s a question Gainor has been asking more intensely since COVID, when she began studying kagura (a ceremonial Shinto dance form) with a teacher from Japan — and performed in two seasonal festivals at Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America.

Gainor, 35, is fifth-generation Japanese American on her mother’s side and Filipina on her father’s side, and was raised among Buddhists, Catholics and atheists. But as she’s learned more about Shinto in the past few years, she’s begun recognizing more “Shinto-y” facets of her family life, like the stops at Mount Shasta.

Even her non-Japanese husband has picked up some habits, telling their kids to thank a car they’re about to get rid of, or say hello to a waterfall.

While she can’t put her finger on where, exactly, the capital-S Shinto ends and the cultural element begins, Gainor says Japanese culture and Japanese American culture are related but distinct traditions — a conclusion that really landed during a 2019 trip to Japan, visiting Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.

“My experience was, ‘This is cool; this is the ancestral land,’ but I definitely felt like just another gaijin (foreigner),” she says. “It was meaningful and beautiful, but it was like visiting Europe — I didn’t feel the same connection as going to a Buddhist temple in L.A., where I can feel the history of my West Coast Japanese elders and ancestors.”

Learning more about Shinto in the past few years has given her some insight into her family culture and raised some questions (“Why isn’t Shinto more explicitly a part of our culture, like Buddhism?”), but also reaffirmed the uniqueness of her background.

“It’s been lovely and thought-provoking to learn more about Shinto, but it’s not like I’ve grown up some deluded, disconnected Japanese person,” she says. “Japanese American culture is really its own thing. It’s not a watered-down version of being Japanese.”

AFTER THREE DECADES of Shinto practice along the Pilchuck River outside Granite Falls, Barrish is retiring — or semiretiring.

He and his wife are moving to Florida, where they plan to open a smaller shrine and aikido dojo. Barrish’s health no longer permits daily misogi in the river. “The cold,” he says, “is not my friend anymore.”

If things go according to plan, Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America will close this summer.

We’ve just been talking about the decline of salmon runs in the Pilchuck, and how he used to see far more otters, beavers and eagles, when Barrish notes that the practice and basic orientation of Shinto remain as relevant as ever.

Some people, he says, argue Shinto is so indigenously Japanese, it cannot fully exist outside Japan. Others argue it’s completely universal, that its type of “original spirituality” is the essential underpinning of all human spirituality.

“What seems to be mutually contradictory doesn’t mean both things can’t be true,” he says. “Especially at this wacky juncture of our human history, when we’re thinking a lot about nature, life, how to move forward.”

Perhaps Shinto — capital-S or otherwise — has something to tell us about the End of Days after all.