Temples and Shrines in Japan: Which to Visit and How
Jul 3, 2026
Japan has roughly 80,000 Shinto shrines and 75,000 Buddhist temples, and most Japanese people will visit both without thinking of themselves as religious. They get married at a shrine, buried from a temple, and buy a good-luck charm at whichever one is closer. The buildings are not in competition.
Temples and shrines in Japan are easy to tell apart once you know the tell: a shrine has a torii gate at the entrance and a temple has a roofed gate with statues in it. Almost all of the famous ones charge either nothing or ¥300 to ¥800, and the best are open from early morning, which is when to go.
Shrines are Shinto, Japan's indigenous religion, and they house kami, the spirits of places, natural forces and ancestors. Temples are Buddhist, arrived from the mainland in the 6th century, and house statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas.
The practical differences:
Entrance: a shrine has a torii, two uprights and a crosspiece, usually vermilion or plain wood. A temple has a sanmon, a roofed gate, often with guardian statues
Names: shrines end in jinja, jingu or taisha. Temples end in ji, dera or in
What you do: at a shrine, bow twice, clap twice, pray, bow once. At a temple, you do not clap, and you may light incense
Purification: both have a water basin at the entrance. Rinse your left hand, then your right, then pour water into your left hand to rinse your mouth
Staff: shrine priests wear white and colored robes, and you may see miko, shrine maidens in white and red. Temple monks have shaved heads and darker robes
The two were officially separated in 1868. Before that they were often mixed on the same site, which is why some places still have both.
We'll build a costed, pre-planned Japan itinerary you can customise to your taste.
The temple of Kiyomizu was founded in 778 around a spring on a wooded hillside in eastern Kyoto's hills. Its wooden stage juts 13 meters out over the slope, built in 1633 on 139 pillars without a single nail.
The Edo-period phrase for taking a leap of faith translates as jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu, because 234 people actually did it between 1694 and 1864. Roughly 85 percent survived, cushioned by the trees.
Otowa Waterfall below the stage splits into three streams for longevity, success and love, and you are supposed to drink from one, not all three. Uphill, Jishu Shrine is dedicated to matchmaking, with two stones 18 meters apart that you walk between with your eyes closed.
Admission is ¥500, open from 6:00, which is unusually early and the single best reason to come at dawn.
Senso-ji in Asakusa is the oldest temple in the Tokyo area, founded in 645 after two fishermen pulled a statue of Kannon from the Sumida River. The current buildings are postwar reconstructions, since the 1945 firebombing destroyed the originals.
Kaminarimon, the outer gate, hangs a 700 kg paper lantern between statues of the gods of thunder and wind. Behind it, Nakamise-dori runs 250 meters to the main hall with around 90 stalls selling crackers, fans and sweets, several run by the same families for generations.
The grounds are free and open around the clock, with the main hall open 6:00 to 17:00. Go before 8:00 or after 20:00 if you want photographs without crowds.
Around 10,000 vermilion torii gates run up the side of Mount Inari in a near-continuous tunnel, each one donated by a business, with the donor's name and date painted on the back. The oldest parts of the shrine date to 711.
Inari is the kami of rice, and by extension of prosperity and business, which is why there are 30,000 Inari shrines across Japan and why foxes, Inari's messengers, stand at every gate with keys in their mouths.
The torii path is free and never closes. The full circuit to the summit takes 2 to 3 hours. Most visitors turn back at the Yotsutsuji viewpoint about 45 minutes up, which means the upper half is genuinely quiet at any hour.
The Great Buddha Hall at Todai-ji in Nara is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world, and the current version, rebuilt in 1709, is only two thirds the width of the 8th-century original.
Inside sits a bronze Buddha cast in 752, 15 meters tall and weighing around 500 tons. The project consumed most of the country's available bronze and nearly bankrupted the state. One pillar at the back has a hole the same size as the Buddha's nostril, and squeezing through it is said to bring enlightenment.
Admission is ¥800 for adults and ¥400 for children, and Nara itself is 45 minutes from Kyoto on the Kintetsu limited express. The temple sits inside the deer park, where around 1,200 wild sika deer bow for crackers sold at ¥200 a pack and will follow you once the packet is open.
The Meiji shrine in Yoyogi enshrines Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken and was completed in 1920. The forest around it, about 170 acres, was planted from scratch with 100,000 trees donated from across the country and designed to become self-sustaining woodland, which it now is.
The barrels you pass on the approach are sake offerings from brewers nationwide, with a matching wall of Burgundy wine barrels opposite, donated because Emperor Meiji promoted Western food and drink.
Entry is free, open sunrise to sunset. Weekend mornings often have a Shinto wedding procession crossing the courtyard. At New Year it draws about three million visitors in three days, more than anywhere else in Japan.
The shrine is built on stilts over a tidal flat so that pilgrims could approach by boat without setting foot on the sacred island. Its great torii stands 16 meters tall in the sea and finished a three-year restoration at the end of 2022.
At high tide the shrine appears to float. At low tide you can walk out to the base of the great torii and see the barnacles on it. Check a tide table before choosing a time.
Shrine admission is ¥300. Since October 2023 there is also a ¥100 visitor tax, collected with the ferry fare or bought separately if you hold a rail pass. The ferry from Miyajimaguchi takes 10 minutes.
Toshogu is the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun who unified Japan, and it is the most heavily decorated religious site in the country. Over 5,000 carvings cover the buildings, in gold leaf and bright pigment, which is the opposite of the restraint people expect from Japanese architecture.
Yomeimon gate alone carries around 500 carvings and is nicknamed the gate where people lose track of time. The three wise monkeys are on the sacred stable, and the sleeping cat carving above the corridor to Ieyasu's tomb is so small most visitors walk past it.
Admission is ¥1,600, or ¥2,400 with the museum, open from 9:00. Nikko up in the mountains is two hours from Asakusa by Tobu limited express.
The top two floors of Kinkaku-ji are covered in gold leaf, and each floor uses a different architectural style: aristocratic on the ground floor, samurai on the second, Chinese Zen on the third.
The building you see dates from 1955. A novice monk burned the original down in 1950, an event Yukio Mishima turned into a novel five years later.
Admission is ¥500 for adults and ¥300 for school students. The route through the garden is one-way and takes about 30 minutes, so arrive at the 9:00 opening or accept the crowds.
Image Credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
Hase-dera climbs a hillside above the sea in Kamakura on the coast, with a terrace looking over the bay. Its eleven-headed Kannon statue is 9.18 meters tall, carved from a single camphor trunk, and is one of the largest wooden statues in Japan.
The grounds hold thousands of small Jizo figures left by parents who have lost children, a cave with carved deities, and a garden of about 2,500 hydrangeas that flower in June and draw timed-entry crowds.
Admission is ¥400. The Great Buddha at Kotoku-in is a ten-minute walk away for another ¥300.
Image Credit: Raita Futo
Izumo Taisha is among the oldest shrines in Japan and is dedicated to Okuninushi, the kami of marriage and relationships. Its shimenawa rope, hung across the worship hall, weighs around 5 tons.
This is the one shrine where you clap four times instead of twice, two for yourself and two for a partner present or future.
In the tenth lunar month, usually November, the gods of Japan are said to leave their own shrines and gather here. The rest of the country calls that month kannazuki, the month without gods. In Izumo it is kamiarizuki, the month with gods, and the shrine holds a week of quiet rituals to receive them.
Entry is free. Izumo is remote, about an hour by air from Tokyo to Izumo Airport or six hours by train, which is why it stays uncrowded.
Bow slightly at the torii or gate before entering, and walk to one side of the central path at a shrine, which is reserved for the kami. Purify your hands and mouth at the basin.
To pray at a shrine, throw a coin in the box, ring the bell if there is one, bow twice, clap twice, pray silently, then bow once more. A ¥5 coin is traditional because the word for five yen sounds like the word for a good connection. At a temple, skip the clapping.
Photography is fine outside almost everywhere and usually banned inside halls. Do not photograph people praying. Remove shoes where there is a step up and a rack, dress so your shoulders and knees are covered, and keep your voice down.
Free: Senso-ji, Fushimi Inari, Meiji Jingu, Izumo Taisha, and most neighborhood shrines
¥300 to ¥500: Kiyomizu-dera, Kinkaku-ji, Itsukushima, Hase-dera
¥800: Todai-ji
¥1,600: Nikko Toshogu, which is the outlier
A goshuin, the calligraphy and stamp collected in a dedicated book, costs ¥300 to ¥500 and the book itself ¥1,500 to ¥3,000. It is the best souvenir in Japan and the books fill up faster than you expect.
Kyoto and Nara give you the highest concentration, with about 1,600 temples and 400 shrines in Kyoto alone. Two days covers the famous ones if you start at opening time each day.
Tokyo has Senso-ji and Meiji Jingu at opposite ends of the Yamanote Line, both free, both doable in a morning. Nikko and Kamakura are day trips from the capital, and Miyajima pairs with Hiroshima.
Build around opening hours rather than distance. Most temples open at 8:00 or 9:00 and close at 16:30 or 17:00, so the day is shorter than it looks. A Kansai route through Kyoto and Nara allows enough days to see them without running.
Pick four or five and spend real time at each. Seeing twenty in a week turns them into a blur of wooden buildings, which is the most common mistake visitors make here.
