Amulet Atlas

placesSensō-ji浅草寺

said SEN-soh-jee

also: Asakusa Kannon · Kinryū-zan Sensō-ji

placeJapanJapan

This one is not fully ours to publish

The temple's principal image of Kannon is a hibutsu — a hidden Buddha, never shown to the public. Accounts give it as gold and about 5.5 centimetres high, and say its true details are unknown. This atlas prints the restriction and stops there. — Sensō-ji's own practice, as recorded in the encyclopedia article on the temple source

The atlas prints the restriction and stops. Why.

Tokyo's oldest-established Buddhist temple, in Asakusa, dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. You reach the main hall through two gates and a shopping street: the Kaminarimon with its 700-kilogram red lantern, then Nakamise-dōri, 250 metres and about 72 shops, then the Hōzōmon. Omikuji stalls stand inside the precinct and along the approach — shake a numbered stick from a metal canister, read the answer out of one of a hundred drawers.

cited

When

628 CE, by tradition, to now still carried cited

PeriodAsuka to the present
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
Note628 is the legendary foundation; the first documented reference is the Kamakura-period Azuma Kagami, for 1181.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

The temple's origin story is a statue in a net: in 628 two brothers fishing the Sumida pulled up an image of Kannon, and the village headman turned his house into a temple for it. The first documented mention is later, in the Kamakura-period Azuma Kagami, which has Asakusa carpenters called to Kamakura in 1181. Tokugawa Ieyasu made it an official place of prayer for the shogunate in 1590.

The shops came with permission. In 1685 the temple licensed businesses on the main approach in exchange for their cleaning the grounds, and Nakamise has been a selling street ever since — cleared by government order in May 1885, rebuilt in brick that December, flattened by the 1923 earthquake, rebuilt in concrete in 1925, burnt out in the firebombing of 10 March 1945. The main hall went in that raid too and was rebuilt between 1951 and 1958, now under a titanium roof.

The temple is the 13th stop on the Bandō Sanjūsankasho pilgrimage route and the most visited religious site in the world, at over 30 million people a year. For a suggested donation of 100 yen a visitor may consult the omikuji oracle.

Tradition holds — the shops on a temple approach are not a later commercial layer but a continuous trade in selling to pilgrims who walked here, which is the encyclopedia's own framing of Nakamise.

cited

Now

Open, with the Nakamise shops on the approach and the omikuji stalls in use. This project has not read the temple's published timetable, so no day is marked open or closed below.

inference

Where

El Mercado de las BrujasThe BarkhorKhan el-KhaliliMerkatoMonastirakiVia San Gregorio ArmenoFushimi Inari-taishaMercado de SonoraThe Marrakesh soukThamelMana Whenua, Te PapaMercado de Brujas de GamarraQuiapo ChurchInsa-dongTha Phrachan amulet marketAkodessawa fetish marketThe Grand BazaarRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British MuseumThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers MuseumThe Lovett charms at Wellcome CollectionThe Egyptian galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nakamise-dōri, Asakusa, Tokyo, Taitō · 35.7147, 139.7968 precision: exact cited

the coordinate published in the English Wikipedia article Sensō-ji, read 2026-09-16

Opening days

Nobody has published days this project could read. That is not the same as closed.

What is on record about it

What this is near

carriesOmikujithe drawn fortune, at 100 yen suggested and a hundred possible drawers, taken at stalls inside this precinctcarriesOmamorithe packet a temple or shrine issues; Nakamise is the selling street that grew on this approach in 1685carriesOfudathe tablet carried home from a temple like this one to the household shelfparallelDarumathe round vow-doll of Japan's market fairs, kin of what the approach's shops have always soldtraditionEngimonothe tradition of luck objects this approach trades inpracticeBuying one in a marketthe practice, licensed by the temple in 1685 in exchange for sweeping the groundsparallelFushimi Inari-taishathe Kyoto shrine at the other scale — a mountain of donated gates instead of a street of shopsartThe market stall signthe drawn signage of a selling street, which Nakamise has carried through four rebuildings

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

placeManeki-nekowhere Hiroshige drew it being sold in 1852 — the earliest picture of the thing in tradeplaceOmamoria Buddhist counter issuing the same class of charm, in Tokyo's oldest templeplaceOmikujia temple where the drawing goes on beside the charm stalls in Tokyo's oldest temple groundsplacePhone charmone temple where the strap format sits on the counter beside every other format of the same prayerplaceEngimonothe approach road the tradition is sold on, licensed by the temple in 1685 in exchange for sweeping the groundsplaceBurning at retirementa temple where the year's talismans are obtained and the old ones handed backplaceBuying one in a marketthe approach road licensed by the temple in 1685, with sweeping the grounds as the rentparallelFushimi Inari-taishathe other end of Japan's charm trade in this atlas: a temple approach lined with 72 shops rather than a mountain of gates

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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