Nobody knows when Otori Taisha was first built. The earliest written reference appears in the Nihon Koki, dated 823 AD, when the Imperial Court asked the shrine to pray for rain. The name surfaces again in the Shoku Nihon Koki and the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku, either in connection with weather prayers or promotions in the shrine's official rank. By 923 AD, when the Engishiki was compiled, Otori Taisha was recorded as the only shrine in Izumi Province to hold a top-tier designation, and an imperial messenger was dispatched to attend its annual Niiname-no-Matsuri harvest festival. The buildings themselves are constructed in the otori-zukuri style, considered the second most ancient form of Shinto architecture after the style of Izumo Taisha. This rare construction method, with its austere simplicity, reflects building traditions that predate the documentary record by centuries.

For much of its early history, Otori Taisha was controlled by a Buddhist temple said to have been founded by the monk Gyoki in either 708 or 740 AD. That temple had deep ties to the Five Regent Houses of the Fujiwara clan, one of the most powerful families in Japanese history. During the Kamakura period, branch shrines proliferated across the country, mostly on shoen estates controlled by the Fujiwara. It was during this expansion that Otori Taisha came to be called the ichinomiya of Izumi Province -- the top-ranked shrine in the region. The main deity worshipped at the shrine during this era was Amaterasu, the sun goddess, though the connection to Yamato Takeru was always acknowledged. One of the two kami enshrined here is identified with Ame-no-Koyane, the ancestor of the Fujiwara clan, reflecting the family's centuries-long patronage.

The shrine's survival has never been guaranteed. In 1575, during the upheavals of the Sengoku period, Oda Nobunaga confiscated the shrine's estates, valued at 1,300 koku, and the buildings burned. Toyotomi Hideyori ordered a reconstruction in 1602, but the shrine was destroyed again during the 1615 Siege of Osaka. In 1662, it was rebuilt by the Sakai bugyo under orders from the Tokugawa shogunate, and in 1701, Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu funded repairs. Under Yanagisawa's patronage, the associated temple grew into the head of the Shingon Risshuu Southern School with 76 daughter temples across the Kansai region. After the Meiji Restoration separated Shinto from Buddhism, the temple was destroyed and Otori Taisha reemerged as a purely Shinto institution. Lightning struck the main shrine building on August 15, 1905, and the current honden was rebuilt in December 1909.

One of the stranger episodes in the shrine's history involves a bureaucratic dispute over which deity it was allowed to worship. After the Meiji government ranked the shrine in 1871, a reevaluation in 1876 changed the official resident kami from Amaterasu to Otori-no-muraji, identified with Ame-no-Koyane, ancestor of the Fujiwara. The shrine protested vehemently. The government upheld its ruling in 1896. For decades, the shrine continued lobbying to install Yamato Takeru -- the hero whose spirit, in the form of a white heron, had supposedly landed in the sacred grove -- as the primary kami. The government refused. It was not until 1961, nearly a century after the dispute began, that the shrine finally succeeded in installing Yamato Takeru alongside Otori-no-muraji. The folk hero had come home at last.

Each year during the first weekend of October, the quiet precincts of Otori Taisha erupt with the thundering wheels and chanting crowds of the Danjiri Matsuri. Massive wooden floats -- some weighing several tons -- are pulled at high speed through the streets and into the shrine grounds, their carved roofs swaying as teams of runners haul them around tight corners. The festival is one of the most energetic and physically demanding in the Kansai region, drawing enormous crowds to Sakai. Priests of Otori Taisha bless each float and pray for the safety of the participants. The contrast between the festival's controlled chaos and the ancient serenity of the shrine's Chigusa no Mori grove is part of what makes the site compelling: a place where the mythological past and the raucous present occupy the same sacred ground.