About this site
Jinja Navi lists Japan's ichinomiya — the first-ranked shrine of each historical province — and is built around the part that is actually hard: getting to them.
Why access comes first
These shrines are old, and the country reorganised itself around them. A shrine that once stood at the centre of a province now sits an hour up a valley, or on an island, or behind a rice field.
The difficulty is never the visit. It is the arrival: a navigation system that routes you to the main hall instead of the car park, an office that closed at four, a fuel gauge in a place with no petrol station. Most shrine listings stop at “ten minutes from the station”. This one starts where that ends.
Addresses stay in Japanese
Every shrine page shows the address in Japanese script, with a copy button. This is deliberate. A romanised address cannot be typed into a rental car's navigation system and is not much use to a taxi driver either. The Japanese text is the thing that works, so that is what we give you — along with the phone number, which is how Japanese navigation systems are usually searched.
How the information is put together
- Primary sources only. Each shrine's own site, national and local government pages (including the Agency for Cultural Affairs' register and the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan), prefectural shrine offices, and the Ichinomiya Pilgrimage Association. Where a prefectural or city tourism association is used, we name it. Not encyclopaedias, not other guide sites.
- Every source is dated. Each page lists the URLs consulted and when they were checked.
- Gaps are shown as gaps. Where we could not verify something, the page says so instead of filling it in.
- Corrections are recorded. Where our own source list turned out to be wrong, the fix and the reason are kept in the data.
What is listed, and what is not
The shrines here fall into two groups, and every page states which one it belongs to.
- On the pilgrimage map
- Listed on Zenkoku Ichinomiya Jinja Shozaichi, the map published by the Ichinomiya Pilgrimage Association (4th revised edition, May 2018). 109 shrines.
- Reference entries
- 11 shrines that are not on that map: former ichinomiya, shrines that claim the title themselves, and closely related old shrines. They are not presented as current ichinomiya.
Because of this, the total is not a single number either. How many ichinomiya are there? sets out which figure comes from which way of counting.
Many sites merge the two without saying so. We keep them apart — including the awkward cases, such as Ono Jinja, whose documentary claim is among the strongest of any shrine here and which is nonetheless absent from the pilgrimage map.
Rules that apply to every page
These used to be repeated on every shrine page. They are set out once here instead.
- Names of deities
- The same deity is written differently from shrine to shrine (大己貴命 at one, 大国主命 at another). Each shrine page keeps that shrine's own spelling. Where the shrine has no website of its own, the spelling is from the prefectural shrine office or the local authority.
- Festivals
- Festival names stay in Japanese because that is what you will see locally; we have not invented English names. Rites held at every shrine in Japan, such as New Year and Setsubun, are left out. Old-calendar dates are not converted.
- Office hours
- Shown exactly as the shrine writes them, in Japanese. The office that sells charms and writes seals keeps shorter hours than the grounds; at a remote shrine, arriving after it closes means finding nobody there.
- Historical ranks
- Engishiki (延喜式, 927) — the court's register of shrines that received state offerings, with grades. Former state rank — the ranking system introduced in 1871 and abolished in 1946. Neither is a current classification.
- Cultural properties
- From the national register kept by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. The construction description is quoted in Japanese exactly as the register gives it. Prefectural and city designations are not covered.
- Page dates
- “Page last updated” at the foot of each page is the day that page's content last changed, not the day the site was rebuilt. Changes before 30 October 2026 were not recorded, so pages unchanged since then show that date (when their current content went live). Shrine pages also give, item by item, the date each source was checked.
Maps and coordinates
The maps use OpenStreetMap. Shrine coordinates were first taken from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan's address search; where that did not reach the street number, we re-located the shrine from OpenStreetMap or a primary source. For 118 shrines the pin now marks the street number or the shrine itself. For the remaining 2, the page says so and directions use the address instead of the pin. Car park locations are kept separately from the shrine, and any that are estimated from OpenStreetMap are marked as such.
Advertising
This site may show Google AdSense advertising. The English pages link to the English site of Tabirai, a car rental booking service, through the A8.net affiliate programme. The Japanese pages carry Rakuten affiliate links for car hire and hotels instead; Rakuten Travel's programme excludes multilingual sites. Nothing is listed, ordered or omitted because of advertising. See the privacy page.
Photographs
Every photograph on a shrine page was taken on site by the site’s editor. They are being added one shrine at a time, each with the month it was taken — precincts change, so treat older photos accordingly. We do not photograph where signs ask us not to, we do not use pictures in which worshippers can be recognised, and the location data recorded in each photo is used to check our coordinates and then removed from the published image.
How we use AI
This site is built with the help of AI (Anthropic's Claude): to find and read primary sources, to draft and tidy text, to write the code that turns our data into pages, and to cross-check the data (addresses against coordinates, the order of closing times, broken links).
Every fact — location, coordinates, opening hours, parking, deities, festival dates, cultural properties, and the basis for calling a shrine an ichinomiya — is checked against a primary source, with the source and the date shown on the page. Where we could not confirm something, the page says so rather than guessing. We do not use AI-generated pictures to show real shrines; if an AI-made image is used anywhere, it is labelled.
Contact
- Site
- Jinja Navi — https://jinja-navi.jp
- Operated by
- IDEA TECHNOLOGY
- info@jinja-navi.jp
Disclaimer
Opening hours, car parks and events change. Check the shrine's own notice before you travel. We cannot accept responsibility for losses arising from the use of this information.
Found an error? info@jinja-navi.jp — corrections are welcome and are recorded with their source.
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