Japanese Sacred Geography

The first thing that stopped me at Chiba Shrine was not the deity. It was the building. In the weeks before I visited, I had kept encountering references to the shrine. Articles appeared in my recommendations. Social media posts mentioned it repeatedly. People sometimes say that when a shrine keeps appearing in your life, it…

In the centre of Tokyo, in Otemachi — one of Japan’s most expensive districts, in the shadow of the Imperial Palace and surrounded by the headquarters of major corporations — there is a gap. The land here is among the most valuable in Japan. The site itself is modest in size, but its estimated value…