Best Temples & Shrines in Japan

Japan has tens of thousands of shrines and tens of thousands of temples, which makes any list of fifteen an argument rather than a survey. The argument this one makes is that a short list should be chosen for range rather than for rank: the entries are picked so that between them they cover the different things a religious site in Japan can be, rather than fifteen variations on the most photogenic thing one can be.

So the selection deliberately spans several axes at once. Shinto and Buddhist sites both, because they are different institutions doing different things and a list weighted to one gives a distorted picture. Sites whose interest is architectural sit alongside sites whose interest is the setting they were built into, and alongside sites that are still primarily places of active practice rather than places of visiting. Where two candidates offered the same experience, the one that added something the list did not yet have won, even when the other was the more celebrated building.

Ordering rewards a specific quality: how much of the place survives the visit. Some of the most famous religious architecture in Japan is now approached along a fixed route in a moving crowd, and the experience is closer to filing past an object than to being somewhere. Sites where you can still stand still, and where the atmosphere the building was designed to produce is available to you, rank higher than more significant buildings where that is no longer possible. Timing can defeat this — the fixed-route sites are transformed early in the morning — and where that is the case the entry says so instead of relying on the ranking to carry it.

What this list does not do is rank by religious importance, which is not a traveller's question and not one this site is placed to answer. Nor does it attempt regional balance: Kyoto and Nara are over-represented here, and that reflects where a millennium of imperial patronage actually built things. The corrective is elsewhere on the site, not a quota inside this list.