Mount Tate

Mount Tate is a 3,015-metre peak in Etchū Province and with Mount Fuji and Mount Haku one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains. Tradition places its opening in 701, when the hunter-ascetic Saeki no Ariyori founded the cult of Tateyama Gongen; Emperor Monmu declared the summit a sacred domain, and Oyama Shrine later became the ichinomiya of Etchū.

The mountain god appears in a Man'yōshū poem of 747 by Ōtomo no Yakamochi. Under the Kamakura and Muromachi shogunates the halls drew warrior patronage: the Kamakura bakufu began raising them in 1185, and Ashikaga Yoshiki sent offerings in 1492.

In the Etchū campaign of 1585 Hashiba Hideyoshi burned the precinct, but Maeda Toshiie of Kaga rebuilt it and made the shrine a prayer centre of his domain; the Shugendō order Tateyama Shugen maintained the mountain cult through the Edo centuries.