Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan
浅草寺 · SEN-soh-jee
Tokyo's oldest temple, and its busiest. A great red lantern hangs at the gate, a street of stalls leads in, and at the far end is a hall built for a statue that nobody has seen in fourteen hundred years.
Photo: Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are at the gate of the oldest temple in Tokyo. Its story begins in 628, when Tokyo was a fishing village on a marsh. Some thirty million people come here every year, more than to any other religious site in Japan.
Almost every building you see was rebuilt in concrete after the fire-bombing of March 1945. The temple has burned and come back many times. People have never stopped coming.
Nothing here needs a ticket. The grounds never close. The main hall keeps daytime hours.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate | Free, always open |
| Nakamise, the street of stalls | Free; shops about 10:00 to 17:00 |
| Hōzōmon, the Treasure Gate | Free, always open |
| The main hall | Free; 6:00 to 17:00 |
| The five-storey pagoda | Seen from outside only |
| Asakusa Shrine and the east gate | Free, always open |
| Denbōin garden | Closed except on special days, which are ticketed |
The gate is called Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate. The god of wind stands on the right and the god of thunder on the left. The lantern between them is nearly four metres tall and weighs about 700 kilograms.
Beyond it, a straight street of small shops runs 250 metres to a second, bigger gate. There have been stalls here for three hundred years.
Behind the second gate is the main hall. It houses a small gold statue of Kannon, the Buddhist figure of mercy whom Chinese call Guanyin. The statue was sealed away in 645 and has not been looked at since, even by the priests.
Wave the incense smoke over yourself, throw a coin, and put your hands together. Then try your luck with a paper fortune for a hundred yen.
"Asakusa" and "Sensō" look like two names. They are two ways of reading the same two characters. The district uses the Japanese reading. The temple uses the reading that came from China.
"It is a shrine." It is a Buddhist temple. The small building to the right of the main hall is a shrine, to the three men who founded the temple. At the temple you do not clap. At the shrine you do.
"The buildings are ancient." The main hall dates from 1958, the Thunder Gate from 1960 and the pagoda from 1973. Two things did survive the bombing: the shrine of 1649 and the east gate of 1618.
"A bad fortune means bad luck." This temple is known for giving out many bad ones, about three in ten. You tie a bad fortune to the rack and leave it behind.
The stops follow the way everyone walks: gate, street, gate, hall, and then the quieter corners.
The gate burned down in 1865 and for ninety-five years there was none. The one you see was paid for in 1960 by Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder of the company now called Panasonic. He had prayed here when he was ill, and he recovered. Look at the brass plate under the lantern. It carries his company's name.
Now look up into the bottom of the lantern. A dragon is carved there. Dragons bring rain, and a wooden city feared fire above everything.
The lantern is made new about every ten years in Kyoto. When a typhoon is coming, or when festival floats must pass, it is folded up flat.
In the late 1600s the temple let the people who swept its grounds set up stalls along the approach. That is the beginning of this street, one of the oldest shopping streets in Japan. There are about ninety shops.
Try the small cakes shaped like pagodas and lanterns, filled with sweet bean paste, and the rice crackers grilled while you wait. Eat them at the shop. Signs ask you not to walk and eat.
The shops' shutters are painted with scenes of old Asakusa. You can only see them early in the morning or at night, when the shops are shut.
The second gate has two fierce guardian kings in front. Its upper floor is a strongroom for the temple's scriptures, which is how it gets its name.
Walk through and look back. On the inner side hang two straw sandals four and a half metres long. Villagers in the north of Japan weave a new pair about every ten years. A demon who sees them is supposed to think a giant lives here and go away.
In front of the hall is a big bronze burner. People fan the smoke towards whichever part of the body they want made well, or towards their heads to be made clever.
At the fortune stands, put a hundred yen in the slot, shake the metal box until a stick drops out, and read the number on it. Open the drawer with that number and take a sheet. The sheets have English on the back.
The hundred fortunes used here came from China. They go back to a set of temple lots used in Song-dynasty Hangzhou, which Japanese monks adopted and spread.
The hall of 1649 was a national treasure. It burned on the night of 10 March 1945, when American bombers set fire to this whole side of Tokyo and about a hundred thousand people died. The present hall, of 1958, copies its shape in concrete. Since 2010 its roof tiles have been titanium, which is light and does not fall in an earthquake.
The inner room, behind the gold doors, holds the statue. A priest named Shōkai sealed it in 645 after a dream told him no one must look at it. A copy made in the ninth century stands in front, and even that is shown only once a year, on 13 December.
Look up. The dragon on the ceiling and the heavenly maidens beside it were painted in the 1950s by two of the best-known Japanese painters of the time.
The pagoda is 53 metres high. The old one stood on the other side of the yard and burned in 1945. This one was finished in 1973. At the top it keeps a relic of the Buddha given by a temple in Sri Lanka.
Come back after dark. The halls and the pagoda are lit until about eleven, the shops are shut, and the crowd is gone.
The artist Hiroshige drew this view in snow in 1856, looking in through the Thunder Gate past the lantern to the pagoda. It is one of the best-known Japanese prints.
To the right of the main hall, through a stone gate, is a shrine built in 1649. It honours the two fishermen who found the statue and the village head who took it in. It escaped the fires of 1945, and so did the red gate beside it, which dates from 1618.
On the third weekend of May the shrine holds the Sanja festival. About a hundred portable shrines are carried through the streets on men's and women's shoulders and shaken as hard as possible, because shaking is thought to wake the power of the god. Nearly two million people come over the three days. In 2026 it was held from 15 to 17 May.
The temple's two founding dates are 628, when the statue was found, and 645, when the first hall was built. In China these are the early years of the Tang (618–907). In 629 the monk Xuanzang left the capital, Chang'an, for India, in search of Buddhist scriptures. In 645 he came home with them.
Buddhism had reached Japan less than a century earlier, from China by way of Korea. The Kannon worshipped here is the same figure as Guanyin, and many Chinese visitors bow to her as they would at home.
Bashō's poem about the bell is seventeen syllables long.
花の雲 鐘は上野か 浅草か
A cloud of blossom: is that bell from Ueno, or from Asakusa?
Matsuo Bashō, 1687
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 628 | Two fishermen net the statue | Second year of Emperor Taizong of the Tang; Xuanzang leaves for India the next year |
| 645 | The first hall is built and the statue is sealed | Xuanzang returns to Chang'an with the scriptures |
| 1590 | Tokugawa Ieyasu makes it his family's prayer temple | The Wanli reign of the Ming |
| 1649 | The main hall and the shrine are rebuilt | Sixth year of the Shunzhi Emperor of the Qing |
| 1865 | The Thunder Gate burns | The Tongzhi reign; the Taiping war has just ended |
| 1923 | The temple survives the great earthquake and its fires | The year before the Whampoa Military Academy is founded |
| 1945 | The hall, the gates and the pagoda burn in the air raid | The war ends in August |
| 1958–1973 | Hall, gates and pagoda are rebuilt | China and Japan open diplomatic relations in 1972 |
One line to remember: a statue found in 628, hidden since 645, and a temple that has been rebuilt every time it burned.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Before dawn on 18 March 628, two brothers were fishing in the river. Again and again their net brought up no fish, only a small gold statue. They threw it back each time and it came up again. They took it to the head of their village, who knew it for a figure of Kannon, and he made his own house into a temple for it.
Source: The temple's own founding story
On the day the statue was enshrined, a dragon with golden scales came down from the sky to the temple. This is why the temple is called Golden Dragon Mountain, and why a dragon dance is held here each March.
Source: Temple tradition
In the 1860s, officials of the new government ordered the box opened, to prove that there was something in it. Those who looked are said to have gone blind, or died soon afterwards.
Source: A story told in Asakusa; the temple says only that an inspection took place
Smoke fanned on to a sore place will heal it, and smoke fanned on to the head will make a child do well at school.
Source: Popular belief
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. Tokyo guides of 2026, which agree with one another; the temple's own site was not opened.
Checked 2026-11-12
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