Temples In Tokyo, And The Shrines Beside Them

A shrine is Shinto and a temple is Buddhist. Shinto is the older, indigenous set of practices, organised around kami, the spirits of places, forces and ancestors. Buddhism arrived from the Asian mainland in the sixth century and the two spent a thousand years intertwined, sharing precincts and clergy, until the Meiji government forcibly separated them in the 1870s.

That separation is why a shrine and a temple can still stand fifty metres apart in Asakusa and belong to different institutions.

Two exceptions worth knowing. First, a graveyard is a reliable tell: Shinto treats death as a source of impurity, so a shrine has no graves and a temple usually does, which is why funerals in Japan are overwhelmingly Buddhist while weddings and new-year visits are Shinto. Second, Yushima Seido is neither, being Confucian, which is exactly why it is an odd twenty minutes rather than a thirteenth temple.

The gate

Bow once, shallowly, before you walk under the torii, and again on the way out as you turn back to face it. The centre of the approach is traditionally kept clear for the kami, so people walk to one side of it; nobody will correct you if you do not, but you will notice that the Japanese visitors around you are doing it.

The temizuya, the water basin, and the mistake everybody makes

The rite is one ladleful of water for the whole sequence, and the mistake is drinking from the ladle.

Take the ladle in your right hand and rinse your left. Swap hands and rinse your right. Swap back, pour a little into your cupped left hand, and rinse your mouth from the hand, not from the ladle; spill it beside the basin, never into it. Then stand the ladle upright so the last of the water runs down the handle and cleans it for the next person, and lay it back where you found it. If the basin has been converted to a running spout with no ladles, which a number of them were and stayed, rinse both hands and skip the rest.

In front of the hall: two bows, two claps, one bow

At a shrine, drop a coin into the offertory box, ring the bell if there is one, then bow deeply twice, clap twice with your right hand slightly lower than your left, hold your hands together for the silent part, and bow deeply once more. Asakusa-jinja prints exactly this sequence on its own pages, along with the instruction to bow at the torii and purify at the basin first.

At a temple you do the same with the coin and the bow, put your palms together, and do not clap. Half the visitors in front of a Tokyo temple hall clap because they were at a shrine an hour earlier, and it is the single most visible foreign error in the city.

The coin

A five-yen coin is the conventional offering because its name, go-en, is a homophone for a word meaning connection or good fortune. That is a pun, not a rule, and any coin is acceptable. What is not acceptable is throwing hard enough to make a noise, or filming somebody else's prayer at close range.

A goshuin is a seal and an inscription, brushed by hand into a book you bring with you, recording that you visited. Asakusa-jinja's own explanation is that it began as a receipt: proof that a worshipper had handed a hand-copied sutra to a temple. Shrines took up the practice when pilgrimage became popular in the Edo period, and the shrine states plainly that it is a record of worship, so you pray first and go to the counter afterwards.

The rules the counters actually enforce

• One book per person is taken in at a time, and one seal per design; Asakusa-jinja states both.
• The shrine will not sell you a book without writing a goshuin in it, and will not post either to you.
• Take off any button-down cover and loosen the binding cord before you hand the book over, because the stamp needs a flat page.
• The calligraphy differs from writer to writer. That is the point of it, and no shrine will redo one.
• Counters keep office hours, generally 09:00 to 16:00, while the grounds are open from dawn. Gotoku-ji's office closes at 15:00, an hour earlier than most.

Eleven of the thirteen places on this page charge nothing to walk in. That is not generosity, it is structure: a shrine's income is offerings, prayers commissioned by worshippers, amulets and seals, while a temple's is offerings, funerals and graves. Neither model needs a turnstile, which is why the money in Tokyo religious sites sits in the museum rather than the gate.

The paid layer, where it exists, is a gallery or a garden: Ueno Toshogu charges ¥700, about $4.54, for the shrine building itself and runs a separate ticket for its peony garden; Zojo-ji charges for its Treasure Gallery and the shoguns' mausoleum; Sengaku-ji charges for the museum of the 47 ronin; Yasukuni charges for the Yushukan. Of those four, only Ueno Toshogu published a figure to us on its own or the city's pages. Zojo-ji, Sengaku-ji and the Yushukan all advertise the attraction without an accessible English price, so we print none and you should carry cash.

What this means practically is that a full day of temples and shrines in Tokyo can cost you less than a single museum ticket. If a free day is what you are planning, free things to do in Tokyo takes the same approach to the rest of the city, and the running total for a day is on what Tokyo costs.

Grounds and offices keep different hours, and every itinerary that goes wrong goes wrong on that difference. Nezu-jinja and Gotoku-ji both open their gates at 06:00. Gotoku-ji's temple office takes visitors from 08:00 to 15:00, Asakusa-jinja's from 09:00, and Meiji Jingu warns on its own site that facilities inside the grounds mainly run 09:00 to 16:00 while the shrine itself opens with sunrise.

So the seal, the amulet and the prayer you commissioned all live inside a narrow midday window, and the photograph lives outside it.

Monday changes nothing here

Tokyo's museums close on Mondays and its temples and shrines do not. Not one of the thirteen on this page publishes a weekly closed day, which makes them the reliable fallback on the one day when a good part of the city's paid attractions is shut. The full Monday picture is on what is open on Monday.

The days that do change things are the first three of January, when tens of millions of people across the country make their first shrine visit of the year and Meiji Jingu alone takes some of the largest crowds in Japan, and the festival weekends: the Sanja Matsuri at Asakusa-jinja in May and the Kanda Matsuri in May of odd-numbered years. The events calendar has the dates.

The consistent line across every institution we read is that the grounds are photographable and the interiors are not. Inside a hall of worship, past the offertory box, assume no. At Meiji Jingu the inner precinct carries its own restrictions posted at the gate; Ueno Toshogu keeps the interior of its main building closed to the public except for a handful of announced days each autumn, which are allocated by application and lottery rather than first come; and Nezu-jinja maintains a standing notice about photography within its precinct.

None of these is a hard rule you can carry between sites, which is why the only durable advice is to look for the sign and to lower the camera when a priest walks past.

• Never photograph a person praying at close range, or a wedding party, without being invited to.
• Tripods, ring lights and reflectors count as commercial equipment at most sites and will be stopped.
• Do not photograph inside a hall of worship unless a sign says you may.
• There is no dress code at any of the thirteen. Shoulders and knees are not an issue at a Japanese shrine, and nobody will hand you a shawl.
• Shoes come off where a floor is raised and matted, which happens at a few temple halls and at almost no shrines.

Commercial guiding, and a temple that has had enough

Gotoku-ji posted a notice on its own site headed, in English as well as Japanese, on commercially guided tours and commercial activities, alongside an older notice asking visitors to stop writing on the beckoning-cat figures. Read together, they are what a small suburban temple looks like after it goes viral. Nothing on this page tells you not to visit Gotoku-ji, but it does mean going quietly, buying a figure from the temple rather than moving somebody else's, and thinking twice about a guided group.

The general form of the problem is worth stating once. These are working religious institutions with congregations, funerals and daily services, not exhibits with an opening time. Every one of them lets you in for nothing and asks for nothing back except that you behave as though somebody there is praying, because somebody there is.