, also known as , is a Shinto shrine located in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan. The shrine is notable because it contains no sacred images or objects, since it is believed to serve Mount Miwa, the mountain on which it stands. For the same reason, it has a , but no . In this sense, it is a model of what the first Shinto shrines were like. Ã Âmiwa Shrine is one of the oldest extant Shinto shrines in Japan and the site has been sacred ground for some of the earliest religious practices in Japan. Because of this, it has sometimes been named as Japan's first shrine. Ã Âmiwa Shrine is a tutelary shrine of the Japanese sake brewers.
à Âmiwa Shrine's history is closely related to Mount Miwa and the religious practices surrounding the mountain. In the early Kofun period, Yamato kings and leaders had shifted their attention to kami worship on Mount Miwa, and à Âmiwa Shrine was the major institution for this branch of worship. The style of Shinto surrounding Miwa became later known as Miwa Shinto and is set apart from previous practices by a more structured theological philosophy.
The shrine became the object of Imperial patronage during the early Heian period. In 965, Emperor Murakami ordered that Imperial messengers be sent to report important events to the guardian kami of Japan. These heihaku were initially presented to 16 shrines, including à Âmiwa.
à Âmiwa was designated as the chief Shinto shrine (ichinomiya) for the former Yamato Province.
From 1871 through 1946, Ã Âmiwa was officially designated one of the , meaning that it stood in the first rank among government supported shrines.
The à Âmiwa Shrine is directly linked to Mount Miwa in that the mountain is the shrine's shintai, or "kami-body", instead of a building housing a "kami-body". This type of mountain worship (shintai-zan) is found in the earliest forms of Shinto and has also been employed at Suwa Shrine in Nagano, and formerly at Isonokami Shrine in Nara and Munakata Shrine in Fukuoka.
According to the chronicle Nihon Shoki, Emperor Sujin appealed to Mount Miwa's kami when Japan was crippled by plague. In response, the kami à Âmononushi demanded rituals be performed for him at Mount Miwa. He then demanded that the rites be led by , his half-kami, half-human son born from the union with a woman of the Miwa clan. performed the rites to satisfaction, and the plague subsided. A building dedicated to was later erected in his honor.
A legendary white snake is said to live in around the shrine and is supposedly one of the kami worshiped there. Indeed, snakes and the snake cult figures importantly in the myths surrounding Mount Miwa as well as early Shinto in general.
The à Âmiwa shrine complex includes notable auxiliary shrines (setsumatsusha), including 12 and 28 which are marked by small structures falling under à Âmiwa's jurisdiction. For example, the sessha Ikuhi jinja enshrines the kami who was appointed à Âmiwa's sake brewer in the 4th month of the 8th year of the reign of Emperor Sujin. A poem associated with Ikuhi is said to have been composed by Empress Jingà « on the occasion of a banquet for her son, Emperor à Âjin:
Hibara Shrine is a subshrine of Omiwa Shrine at the foot of Mount Miwa in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture. The shrine is identified as the place where the Yata-no-Kagami and the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi were first enshrined after they were removed from the imperial palace. It is the first of many shrines. Amaterasu was originally enshrined there before eventually moving to other Moto-Ise shrines and then finally to Ise Jingu. It has an Iwakura rock and a Shinza made of Sakaki wood.
It has a prominent unique closable triple torii gate.
à Âmiwa Shrine is situated in a quiet forest and built directly in front of Mount Miwa. An ancient Japanese cedar tree (Cryptomeria) can be found on shrine compound and is considered sacred. The shrine has Mount Miwa as its Shintai, as a Kannabi and does not have a honden.
Decorations in the form of Borromean rings are found throughout the shrine's buildings. This ornamentation symbolizes the three rings, as "Miwa" is written with the kanji for and .
Built in 1984, at 32 m the torii on its sandà  is the second highest in Japan. The shrine also has a great shime torii, an ancient form of gate made only with two posts and a rope called shimenawa. It is one of few shrines that has a "triple-torii" (miwa torii) on its grounds. This gate is also one of the few to actually have doors, which bar access to the mountain it enshrines (though Mount Miwa is publicly accessible by same-day arrangement with the Sai Jinja office).
The buildings at à Âmiwa Shrine are a mix of structures built from ancient times to the Edo period.