Senso-ji Temple and Asakusa: Tokyo’s Oldest Temple District

Senso-ji Temple is the oldest temple in Tokyo, and the district that grew up around it, Asakusa, is the part of the city where the old town of Edo is easiest to imagine. The temple traces its story to a small statue pulled from the Sumida River in 628; under the Tokugawa shoguns it became Edo’s favourite place of pilgrimage and pleasure, and today, by the temple’s own count, around 30 million people visit each year. This guide covers the temple’s history, what to look for between the great lantern gate and the main hall, the streets and shrine beyond, and how to plan a visit. On Day 2 of our Walking Japan small group tour, the group reaches Asakusa on foot through old Edo before taking the train north to Nikko.

A statue in a fishing net: how Senso-ji began

The temple’s founding story is told in its own records. Early on the morning of 18 March 628, two brothers, Hinokuma Hamanari and Takenari, were fishing in the Sumida River when they found a small statue of the bodhisattva Kannon in their net. The village headman, Haji no Nakatomo, recognised it, turned his house into a temple and spent the rest of his life in its service. In 645 a priest named Shokai built a hall for the statue and, following a dream, decided that it should never be shown. It has stayed hidden ever since, kept in a locked shrine that, the temple says, even its chief priests do not open.

Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion, believed to hear the cries of the suffering, and the temple is still widely known by her name as Asakusa Kannon. In the ninth century the Tendai monk Ennin is said to have carved a second image so that worshippers would have something to see; that copy too is displayed only rarely. Asakusa itself was then a fishing village on the edge of Tokyo Bay, and it grew as pilgrims came. The three founders are honoured today at Asakusa Shrine, beside the main hall.

Edo’s temple: shoguns, pilgrims and pleasure-seekers

Senso-ji’s great age began with the Tokugawa. In 1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu, soon to be the first Tokugawa shogun, made it the temple where prayers were offered on behalf of his government, and his grandson Iemitsu, the third shogun, rebuilt the main buildings in the middle of the seventeenth century. As Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world, the temple became, in its own words, the cultural centre of the city. Our history of Tokyo from Edo to the modern capital sets out how that city took shape.

Asakusa was where Edo came to enjoy itself as well as to pray. Stalls appeared along the approach to the main hall around 1685, when the temple allowed local residents to trade there in return for sweeping the grounds, and in 1817 a local association of devotees paid for the approach to be paved so that pilgrims no longer waded through mud. Tea houses lined the inner approach, and in the early 1840s, during the Tenpo Reforms, the shogunate moved Edo’s licensed kabuki theatres out of the city centre to Saruwaka-machi in Asakusa, then on the edge of the city. The woodblock artists followed: the lantern gate of that period was a favourite subject of Utagawa Hiroshige and his contemporaries.

Poets knew the temple too. Matsuo Basho, who lived across the river in Fukagawa, wrote a haiku that the temple still quotes, wondering whether the bell sounding through a cloud of cherry blossom came from Ueno or from Asakusa. The temple identifies it as the bell at Bentendo, a small hall on a mound inside the grounds. Our guide to Basho’s Fukagawa and the Edo museum near his hut covers that side of the river in more depth.

Destroyed in 1945, rebuilt by the faithful

Much of what visitors see today is younger than it looks. The main hall built under Iemitsu survived the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but on 10 March 1945 the Great Tokyo Air Raid burned it to the ground, together with the five-storey pagoda and most of the surrounding district. The temple’s principal image was saved, and for some years worship continued in a temporary hall, the building now known as Awashimado. The new main hall, built in reinforced concrete to the form of its predecessor with donations from worshippers across Japan, was completed in 1958.

The other landmarks followed over the next fifteen years. The Kaminarimon, the outer gate, had already been lost to a fire in 1865 and stood unbuilt for 95 years until Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the company now called Panasonic, paid for the present gate in 1960. The inner gate, Hozomon, was rebuilt in 1964 and the pagoda in 1973. Among the older buildings that came through the war are the Nitenmon, a gate on the east side of the main hall built in 1649 and now an Important Cultural Property, and the hall of Asakusa Shrine, built in the same year. Knowing this makes the precinct more interesting rather than less. It is a living temple that its worshippers have rebuilt several times over, not a museum piece.

Walking the approach: Kaminarimon to the Main Hall

The classic way into Senso-ji is from the south, through the Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate. Its formal name, Furaijinmon, comes from the statues of Fujin, god of wind, and Raijin, god of thunder, who stand on either side to protect the temple. The great red lantern that hangs in the opening is 3.9 metres tall and weighs about 700 kilograms; look up at its base to see a carved dragon.

Beyond the gate, Nakamise runs about 250 metres to the Hozomon. It is one of the oldest shopping streets in Japan, with around 90 small shops selling traditional toys, sweets and snacks, wooden clogs, kokeshi dolls and souvenirs. After closing time, painted scenes from the temple’s history and festivals appear on the shop shutters, which is one reason to walk it again in the evening.

The Hozomon, or Treasure House Gate, stores the temple’s sutras in its upper storey and is guarded by two wooden Nio statues more than four metres tall. On the back of the gate hang a pair of enormous straw sandals, each 4.5 metres tall, made and donated by volunteers from Murayama in Yamagata Prefecture. They are said to represent the strength of the Nio: evil spirits that see sandals of that size will assume the temple’s guardians are giants and keep away.

In the courtyard between the gate and the main hall stands a large bronze incense burner, where worshippers draw the smoke over themselves, a gesture traditionally believed to bring good health. The main hall itself has a tall, steeply pitched roof, re-covered with lighter titanium tiles in 2010. Inside, the outer hall rises to a ceiling painted with a dragon by Kawabata Ryushi and celestial maidens by Domoto Insho, and the gilded shrine that holds the hidden image sits in the inner sanctum. To pray, the temple asks visitors to place their palms together; this is a Buddhist temple, so there is no clapping.

Near the main hall you will also find the omikuji, paper fortunes drawn by shaking a numbered stick from a box. Senso-ji’s set of 100 fortunes has a reputation for giving bad luck more often than most, which the temple attributes to keeping the traditional proportions. Those who draw a bad fortune tie it to the racks provided and ask for Kannon’s protection.

Asakusa Shrine and the streets beyond

Just east of the main hall, Asakusa Shrine honours the three men of the founding story. Its hall was built in 1649 with the support of Iemitsu, survived fire, earthquake and war, and was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1951. It is built in the gongen style, with the main sanctuary and the worship hall joined by a connecting chamber, the same style as the far grander Nikko Toshogu, the Tokugawa mausoleum shrine. Every May the shrine holds the Sanja Matsuri, one of the great festivals of Edo, when portable shrines are carried through the neighbourhood. At a Shinto shrine the usual form of prayer is two bows, two claps and one bow, so the etiquette changes in the space of a few steps.

Asakusa repays time away from the main approach. The covered arcades and side lanes to either side of Nakamise are full of small restaurants and specialist shops, and in the modern era the district became Tokyo’s centre of popular theatre, cinema, music and variety shows. A few minutes east is the Sumida River, with a riverside walk lined with cherry trees and a view across to the Tokyo Skytree. Allow time simply to wander: this is the district that best keeps the scale and tone of the old townspeople’s city.

What is the best time to visit Senso-ji Temple?

The best time to visit Senso-ji Temple is early morning, before the Nakamise shops open and the tour coaches arrive. At the time of writing, the main hall opens at 6 a.m. (6:30 a.m. from October to March) and closes at 5 p.m., while the grounds stay open after the hall closes and, according to Japan’s national tourism organisation, the buildings are lit from sunset until around 11 p.m. That makes an evening walk an attractive second visit. The first days of January, when crowds come for the first temple visit of the year, and festival days are the busiest times; check the temple’s website for hours and events before you go.

How long do you need at Senso-ji and Asakusa?

Allow at least an hour for the temple itself and two to three hours if you want to include Asakusa Shrine, the side streets and a meal. A first visit that walks the approach, sees the main hall and pagoda and stops at the shrine can be done comfortably in a morning. If you are in Tokyo for several days, a second visit after dinner, when Go Tokyo notes the shopping street is calmer, shows a quieter side of the district.

How do you get to Senso-ji, and how much walking is involved?

The temple is about a five-minute walk from Asakusa Station, which is served by the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, the Toei Asakusa Line, the Tobu Railway and the Tsukuba Express. The grounds are flat and paved, and the temple says it has worked to remove changes in level. The main hall is reached by a broad flight of steps, with a lift on the left side for those who find stairs difficult. The real effort is standing and shuffling through crowds on Nakamise in the middle of the day, so wear comfortable shoes and take breaks in the quieter lanes.

Senso-ji on Walking Japan and Japan Odyssey

On the Walking Japan tour, Asakusa comes at the end of a long day on foot. After breakfast on Day 2, the main luggage goes ahead by courier, and the group carries what it needs for the night in daypacks. The day begins at the Tsukiji fish market and its outer market streets, continues through downtown old Tokyo to Fukagawa and the Basho Museum, and then carries on through old Edo to Asakusa, which the tour describes as the home of the Edokko, the original townspeople of Edo. The group visits Senso-ji and takes time to explore the surrounding streets before boarding a mid-afternoon train from Asakusa to Nikko, arriving in time for dinner. It is the opening stage of a journey that follows Basho north, described in our introduction to walking Japan on the poet’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. The tour is rated Activity Level 3 – Moderate to Challenging, participants typically walk for up to five hours a day, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout.

The Japan Odyssey tour travels at a gentler pace, through Kyoto, Hiroshima, Matsue and Hakone before ending in Tokyo. Its guided sightseeing day in the capital takes in Tokyo Tower and the Imperial Palace, with the opportunity to visit the busy Nakamise shopping street, and the days that follow are free, so there is time to return to Asakusa at your own pace.

Senso-ji has been burned and rebuilt more than once, yet the statue at its heart has stayed hidden for nearly fourteen centuries, and the crowds who come to it have never really stopped. Arriving on foot, as the Walking Japan tour does with a small group of up to 16 travellers, you approach it the way Edo’s pilgrims did, through the streets of the old city to the gate with the great red lantern.