Nara, Japan
春日大社 · kah-SOO-gah TIE-shah
A vermilion shrine at the foot of a mountain nobody may climb, reached by a forest path lined with two thousand stone lanterns. It was founded in 768 for the family that ran Japan for three centuries, and every lantern was given by someone who wanted something.
Photo: Zairon, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing in front of a two-storey gate painted vermilion, with a roof of cypress bark. Bronze lanterns hang in a row under its eaves. Behind it, where you may not go, four small halls stand side by side, one for each of four gods.
The shrine was founded in 768. That year Charlemagne became king of the Franks, and Tang China was rebuilding after the An Lushan rebellion; the poet Du Fu had two years left to live.
Part of Nara Park. Also there: Kōfuku-ji, Tōdai-ji.
The paths, the lanterns, the outer court and Wakamiya are free and open all day. Three things charge 700 yen each: the inside of the cloister, the museum and the botanical garden. The four main halls are seen from the middle gate and are not entered.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The first torii and the approach | Free, always open |
| Man'yō Botanical Garden and its wisteria | 700 yen |
| Kasugataisha Museum | 700 yen |
| The South Gate, the outer court and the great cedar | Free |
| Inside the cloister: the middle gate, the bronze lanterns, the dark room | 700 yen (special admission) |
| The four main halls | Seen from the middle gate; not entered |
| Wakamiya and the small shrines along the path | Free |
| Kasugayama Primeval Forest (walking trail) | Free |
This is Kasuga Taisha, a Shinto shrine, not a Buddhist temple. It was built for the Fujiwara family, who married their daughters to emperors and governed in their name from the ninth century to the twelfth. The four gods here were the family's own.
The first of the four is said to have arrived riding a white deer. That is why the deer of Nara were treated as messengers of the gods, and why they still wander freely through the town.
There are about three thousand lanterns: some two thousand of stone along the paths and a thousand of bronze under the eaves. People have been giving them for nine hundred years, each with a prayer. All of them are lit on only three nights a year.
Before you leave, look at the colour. The vermilion paint, the white walls and the dark bark roofs are renewed about every twenty years, and have been sixty times.
"It is a temple." It is a shrine: there are no Buddhas here, people clap when they pray, and the priests wear white. But until 1868 the shrine and the temple of Kōfuku-ji down the hill were run as one, and monks chanted sutras in front of these halls.
"The lanterns are lit every night." They are lit on 3 February and on 14 and 15 August. On other days, a dark room inside the cloister keeps some burning so that visitors can see the effect.
"It is rebuilt from new every twenty years." It was, for a thousand years. Since 1863 the four main halls have been repaired and repainted, not replaced.
"The grassy hill is Mount Mikasa." The bare hill north of the shrine is Mount Wakakusa. The sacred mountain, Mikasa, is the dark wooded cone straight behind the halls, and it is closed.
"The deer belong to the shrine." They are wild animals that belong to nobody. Their story is on the page for Nara Park.
The stops follow the walk in from the park: the first gate, the lanterns, the outer court, the halls, the bronze lanterns, the younger shrine, the forest.
The approach begins at a wooden torii at the edge of the park. A gate was first put up here in 836; the present one is of the 1630s. From it the path runs more than a kilometre, straight and slightly uphill, through the trees to the shrine.
Just inside the torii, on the right, a young pine grows behind a fence. It replaced an old tree that died in 1995. The god of Kasuga is said to have appeared at that pine as an old man and danced. The pine painted on the back wall of every Noh stage in Japan is this tree.
Walk in the middle only if you must. The centre of the path is kept for the gods, and Japanese visitors keep to the side.
After the second torii the lanterns begin to crowd both sides of the path, two and three deep, each on its own post and furred with moss. There are about two thousand. Most carry the name of the giver and a date.
The givers were not only lords. From the seventeenth century, merchants, guilds of rice dealers and soy brewers, and village clubs who saved for years to send one member on pilgrimage all paid for lanterns. The newest are from this century.
Each lantern has a small window that was once pasted with paper, and a lamp of rapeseed oil inside. Lighting two thousand of them took the whole evening, which is one reason it is now done only at festivals.
The South Gate is twelve metres high and is the main way into the cloister. Beyond it is an open court with a long low hall. The front part was for laying out offerings and the back part for sacred dance; when rain stops a ceremony outside, it moves here.
To the left stands a cedar that the shrine puts at 800 to 1,000 years old, 25 metres tall and nearly nine round the trunk. A second tree grows out of its root, and it leans through a hole cut for it in the roof of the hall next door. The carpenters moved the roof, not the tree.
The two-storey gate ahead of you is the middle gate, ten metres high. People often take it for the shrine itself. The four main halls stand behind it in a row, and only priests go further.
Each hall is barely two metres wide. The door is in the gable end, under a porch roof that sweeps forward. Shrine builders all over Japan copied the form, and it is named after this place: Kasuga style.
The first two gods were brought from shrines far to the east, near modern Tokyo; they are gods of thunder and the sword. The third is the ancestor of the Fujiwara, a god of ritual words, and the fourth is his wife. Together they made a pantheon for one family.
In the Middle Ages, people who could not travel to Nara hung a painting of the shrine at home and prayed to that. Some show only a deer with a sacred tree on its saddle and five small Buddhas in its branches: the gods of Kasuga, seen as Buddhas in another form.
With the 700 yen ticket you can walk the inside of the cloister. A thousand bronze lanterns hang here from the eaves, some gilded, each pierced with its own pattern: wisteria, deer, a family crest.
The shrine points out lanterns given by warlords of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men who spent their lives fighting each other and hang here side by side.
At the north-east corner is a former priests' office with the shutters closed and the lanterns lit. Mirrors on the walls multiply them. It is the only place to see, on an ordinary day, what the festival nights look like.
A hundred metres south along a lantern-lined path is Wakamiya, the "young shrine", for a child of the third and fourth gods. It was built in 1135, in years of flood, famine and plague.
The next year the regent ordered a festival here to ask for relief. It has been held every year since 1136. At midnight on 17 December all lights are put out and the god is carried in darkness down to a temporary hall in the park, where music and dance are offered until the following night.
Several of the dances are older than Noh theatre and are among its sources. Some survive nowhere else.
Hunting and cutting wood on the hills behind the shrine were forbidden in 841, to keep the gods' ground pure. Nothing has been felled since. The result is about 250 hectares of old evergreen forest ten minutes' walk from a city centre, and it is part of the World Heritage listing.
Mount Mikasa itself, the cone behind the halls, is 297 metres high and closed to everyone. In 753, at a farewell banquet on the coast of China, Abe no Nakamaro looked up at the moon and thought of it:
天の原 ふりさけ見れば 春日なる 三笠の山に 出でし月かも
When I look up into the wide plain of heaven, is that the same moon that rose over Mount Mikasa at Kasuga, long ago?
Abe no Nakamaro, 753; in the Kokin Wakashū and the Hyakunin Isshu
His ship was wrecked and blown to Vietnam. Li Bai, hearing he had drowned, wrote a lament for him. He had in fact survived, walked back to Chang'an, and served the Tang for another seventeen years.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 710 | The capital moves to Nara, laid out on the plan of Chang'an | Tang China: Emperor Xuanzong will take the throne in two years |
| 717 | Abe no Nakamaro sails for China | Li Bai is sixteen; in Europe an Arab army besieges Constantinople |
| 768 | The shrine is founded | Charlemagne becomes king of the Franks; the Tang (618–907) is rebuilding after the An Lushan rebellion |
| 841 | Hunting and felling banned on the hills behind | Tang Emperor Wuzong is about to close the Buddhist monasteries of China |
| 1136 | The first December festival at Wakamiya | Nine years after the Song lost north China; in France the first Gothic church is about to be begun at Saint-Denis |
| 1863 | The four main halls are rebuilt for the last time | The Taiping war in China; the battle of Gettysburg in America |
| 1868 | Gods and Buddhas are separated by law; the monks leave | The Meiji Restoration; in China, the Tongzhi reign under Empress Dowager Cixi |
| 1998 | Listed as World Heritage with seven other sites in Nara | The same year as the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The first god of Kasuga rode here from his shrine in the east on the back of a white deer and alighted on Mount Mikasa. The deer of Nara are descended from it.
Source: Shrine tradition; the picture scroll Kasuga Gongen Genki of 1309
Nearly all the stone lanterns are inscribed "Kasuga shrine". Fifteen are inscribed "great bright god of Kasuga". Whoever finds three of those in a single night will become rich.
Source: A saying in Nara, repeated by the shrine's guides
The god of Kasuga appeared under the pine by the first torii in the form of an old man and danced there.
Source: Shrine tradition; the tree is the model for the pine painted on Noh stages
The old wisteria in the outer court, whose flower clusters hang low enough to brush the sand, was planted by the Konoe, the senior branch of the Fujiwara.
Source: The shrine's own guide, which says it is "said to have been planted" by them; the vine appears in the scroll of 1309
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The shrine's own English guide page, opened in November 2026; museum and garden fees from recent travel reports.
Checked 2026-11-12
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