ABSTRACT
The history of Shingū can conveniently be divided into three epochs; the time before, during and after the Tokugawa period. Hardly anything is known specifically about Shingū before the emergence of the Tokugawa shogunate; in fact Shingū did not come into existence at its present site before well into that period. But the community was not created from nothing, the seeds were sewn a long time before. To understand the founding and the subsequent development of Shingū, a few words will be said about the earliest times.
