If you know this, you can prove you’re a true Nishinomiya expert. It’s time for the “Nishinomiya Quiz” section.
This article is brought to you by “ALBOBBY,” a salon that supports Nishitsu.
Here’s today’s quiz↓
How do you read the name of this bridge?
a. Mitarashigawa Bridge
b. Mitaraigawa Bridge
c. Otearai-gawa Bridge
Nishitsu correct answer rate: 25%
If you haven’t seen the answer yet, give it a try♪
- みたらしがわ橋33%(198票)
- みたらいがわ橋66.2%(397票)
- おてあらいがわ橋0.8%(5票)
It’s an intersection on Route 171.
Here it is on the map↓
The address is 6 Ohatacho, Nishinomiya City.
The correct answer is b. Mitaraigawa Bridge.
But the street name is Mitarashi-doriI feel like it used to be written in kanji
As we’ve mentioned in a previous article, the current name of this river is Higashigawa ＼(^o^)／
In the survey in that article, people around this area overwhelmingly recognized it as Mitarashigawa….
I got a little curious, so I looked into it (*^^)v
Meaning of “Mitarai”
- It can be read as mitarai or mitarashi.
- A place where you wash your hands and rinse your mouth before visiting a shrine.
- It can refer to flowing water such as a river (a famous example is the Isuzugawa River at Ise Jingu) or a chozuya water basin the kind you often see at shrines.
Since it seems to be related to a shrine, we contacted Hirota Shrine↓↓↓
Until around the Edo period, during the time of Tokugawa Yoshimune, the shrine was not in its current location but on the opposite side of the Mitarashi River(Hirota Shrine called it the Mitarashi River).
It was called the Mitarashi River because people purified their hands in the river, but the river was shallow and often flooded, causing flood damage to Hirota Shrine, so the shrine moved to its current location.
That’s what they told us ＼(^o^)／
We drifted from a quiz into a bit of trivia, but now we know that the Mitarashi River was:
a sacred river where people purified their hands and mouths before visiting the historic Hirota Shrine!!
