Kehi Jingu

The great torii at Kehi Jingu is 10.9 metres high, built of wood, and is counted with Kasuga Taisha in Nara and Itsukushima in Hiroshima as one of the three great wooden torii of Japan. It is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property and it stands at the end of an ordinary shopping street in Tsuruga, which is a slightly startling way to encounter it.

The shrine dates its foundation to 702 and was the first-ranked shrine of Echizen province. Tsuruga people call it Kei-san. The other thing to know is that Matsuo Basho came here in 1689 on the journey that became Oku no Hosomichi and wrote about the moonlight on the sand that a priest had spread in the grounds — the sand-carrying rite is still performed. The grounds are free and open, fifteen minutes from the station, and the torii is worth the walk on its own.

What sets Kehi apart from the other two members of the 'three great torii' is how unceremoniously it sits in the middle of ordinary life — Kasuga Taisha and Itsukushima are both destinations in their own right, approached with the expectation of a monument, while Kehi appears at the end of a street lined with shops the way a normal building would, so that the scale only registers once you're standing directly beneath it. The shrine's long history as Echizen province's ranking shrine meant it drew pilgrims and dignitaries for centuries before Tsuruga became better known as a port town, and the grounds beyond the torii keep that older, quieter character — mature trees, a pond, side shrines that see far fewer visitors than the gate itself. Tsuruga's role as a crossing point, first for pilgrims and later for railway and shipping traffic, is part of why a shrine of this rank ended up embedded in a commercial street rather than isolated on a hill.