Traveling through Japan is a wonderful experience which exposes us to new sights, sounds, and cultures. A typical experience will often involve walking through city streets, riding subways or buses, and finding new things to contemplate. Many times when I knew more about the places I was visiting, whether that was through a guide, a pamphlet, or some other source, my experience became even more special. As a student of Japanese history, I found that during my travels of Japan I could trace some of my favorite historical figures by how they interacted with the cultural and spiritual arteries of the nation. In some cases, those figures were patrons of a specific temple, shrine, or deity which the family prayed to for centuries, sometimes the sites were founded by those figures for political purposes, and other times the sites were built to represent a fallen person of great stature or to symbolize an ideal in a physical form. 

The locations and sites which I will write about will be those that I have visited personally and will advise how important or intriguing they might be to potential visitors. Some places are important cultural sites because they have been visited by major figures throughout history, but that does not always guarantee: #1 that the site is in any way a visual masterpiece and #2 that the casual viewer should care if they don't know anything about the associated major figures. However, for those who have studied at least basic Japanese history or art, I hope that you can use this to connect what you have read to what you can experience. For this reason I will be giving each location a scrore out of 10, at least to help illustrate on a basic level my thoughts and feelings about each location. Because of what I said before, each location has a grading for “casual” viewers and “educated” viewers. I don’t wish to insinuate that people without an education in these matters should be considered any differently, but there are certainly some places that are really only viable travel destinations because of some specific aspect or detail typically associated with deeper themes of Japanese art and history. Please use both rankings to help gauage what interest level you might have.

The purpose of this site is for any and all who wish to travel around Japan and see the multitudes of historical sites which are most commonly in the form of temple complexes and shrines of varying sizes. Sometimes they can be the size of a shopping cart and other times they’re the size of the mountain where the site is located. For general information regarding temples and shrines, please visit the introduction posts in both sections to learn about visitor behavior, characteristics, and general information about both types of structures. Important or well known sites like castles, palaces, ruins, and monuments have been put in the ‘Other’ section of the blog. Please read the introduction post regarding my thoughts to the locations I will write about in that section. There are two methods to navigate the site: the first is to go to the Shrines, Temples, or Others tab where you can read my latest posts on each subject, and the second is to look up a specific location by clicking on the links below. The sites listed on this website will mostly be from the Kanto and Kansai regions, where the cities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, and Nara can be found. I will be updating my information based on new research and new locations I have visited with every trip.

よろしくおねがいします。