ABSTRACT
Izumo Shrine as an institution shared the same political, religious and architectural strategies as Ise, employing an architectural idiom based on early elite residences and differing from the granary prototype of Ise in detail only. However the defeat of its patrons in the struggle for national hegemony relegated its architecture to a less illustrious fate as a regional shrine, its myths and legends to a place of derision in the official mythology of the nation, and its clan leaders to disgruntled provincial obscurity. This fate was sealed, as we shall see, by a series of spectacular structural failures of the main shrine building in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
