Sensō-ji - Tokyo's Oldest Temple
Main-hall hours are seasonal (from 6:30am Oct–Mar) — confirm on the Sensō-ji site before you go.
Walk up under the giant red lantern of the Thunder Gate, down a 250-metre avenue of stalls thick with the smell of grilling rice crackers and sweet bean cakes, and you arrive at the great hall of Sensō-ji — and it’s worth pausing on the fact that people have made almost exactly this approach for thirteen centuries. Tokyo wears its modernity loudly, but here, in Asakusa, the city keeps its oldest heart, and it is still a working place of worship that draws some thirty million visitors a year.
A little background
The legend is lovely and specific: in the year 628, two fishermen brothers pulled a small golden statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, from the Sumida River. The village headman recognised it as sacred, turned his house into a temple to enshrine it, and devoted his life to it. That temple became Sensō-ji, and Kannon remains its deity to this day; the original statue is a hibutsu, a hidden image, never shown.
What you see now is, strictly, recent. The temple was a favourite of the Tokugawa shoguns and the heart of old Asakusa’s pleasure quarter for centuries, but the main hall and the five-storey pagoda were destroyed in the firebombing of March 1945 and rebuilt in the post-war decades. The reconstruction is faithful, and the sense of continuity — of a place worshipped at without a break for fourteen hundred years — is entirely real.
What to see
The Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate). The outer gate and the symbol of Asakusa, hung with a colossal red paper lantern nearly four metres tall, a dragon carved into its base. Flanking it are Fūjin and Raijin, the gods of wind and thunder.
Nakamise-dōri. The shopping street running from the Thunder Gate to the inner gate — around ninety shops over 250 metres, selling folding fans, yukata and, above all, snacks: ningyō-yaki (little filled cakes), senbei rice crackers fresh off the grill, age-manjū. It has served pilgrims for some three hundred years, and grazing your way up it is part of the ritual.
The Hōzōmon, main hall and pagoda. Beyond the inner gate (with its giant straw sandals and guardian Niō figures) stand the main hall, where you can toss a coin, draw an omikuji fortune and waft the smoke of the great incense burner over yourself for luck, and the soaring five-storey pagoda alongside — at over 53 metres, one of the tallest in Japan.
Asakusa Shrine. Immediately beside the temple stands a Shintō shrine built in 1649 — a rare survivor of the 1945 raids — dedicated to the men in the founding legend. The coexistence of Buddhist temple and Shintō shrine side by side is very Japanese, and worth noticing rather than walking past.
A note on timing: Asakusa is one of Tokyo’s busiest sights, and early morning is the answer — the grounds are open around the clock, so you can have Nakamise almost to yourself at dawn, and the temple is also quietly beautiful at night, when the gates and pagoda are floodlit and the day-trippers have gone.
Come early, before the crowds thicken along Nakamise-dōri, and let the smoke find you first. At the great bronze censer people draw the incense toward themselves — over the head, the chest, a bad shoulder — and you may feel faintly self-conscious doing the same. Do it anyway. Notice that the gesture asks nothing of your beliefs; it only asks you to slow down and tend, for a moment, to your own body. This is Tokyo's oldest temple, and around it once turned the whole raucous pleasure-world Kawabata wrote into being — theatres, revues, the lost and the hopeful, all under the same bells that still sound here. Stand under the vast red lantern of the Thunder Gate and let the crowd flow past. You are standing where the city has come to hope and to grieve for thirteen centuries. The temple is loud, commercial, thronged. It is also, if you let it be, still holding that older function open — a place to bring the thing you carry and set it down..
Cost and hours
Admission is free. The main hall is open roughly 6am to 5pm (from 6:30am in winter), but the grounds never close, and an after-dark visit is a genuine highlight. Asakusa is a few steps from Asakusa Station (Ginza, Asakusa and Tōbu lines). A goshuin shrine stamp is available for around ¥500.
Explore further
Yasunari Kawabata, 2005, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (trans. Alisa Freedman). University of California Press. Modernist novel and kinetic portrait of 1920s Asakusa around Sensō-ji; the novel opens and closes with the temple’s bells.
Donald Richie, undated, Essays on Tokyo and Forward to The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. These include observations about the historical relationships between the temple and the neighbourhood – the piety and the pleasure seeking.
External links
Sensō-ji official site with information on the history and the calendar of festivals at the temple.