The Most Beautiful Temples in Japan
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful temples in Japan are Itsukushima Shrine, Kiyomizu-dera and Tōdai-ji Temple. The list covers 13 temples. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Japanese temples are built from wood, and that single choice explains much of their character: long eaves that throw deep shade, halls that sit lightly on stone platforms, and a tradition of careful rebuilding that has kept some structures standing for more than a thousand years. Buddhism arrived in the sixth century and settled alongside the older Shinto faith rather than replacing it, so shrines and temples often share hills and precincts. Gardens of moss, gravel and water became part of the architecture itself.
The oldest layer is in Nara: Hōryū-ji, whose buildings are among the oldest surviving wooden structures anywhere, and Tōdai-ji, whose Great Buddha Hall shelters a colossal bronze Buddha. Kyoto adds the wooden stage of Kiyomizu-dera, jutting out over a wooded slope, the gold-leaf Kinkaku-ji reflected in its pond, the quieter Ginkaku-ji, and the long hall of Sanjūsangen-dō with its ranks of Kannon statues. Byōdō-in near Uji, whose Phoenix Hall appears on the ten-yen coin, shows the Pure Land ideal in built form.
Beyond the old capitals, Itsukushima Shrine stands in the sea off Miyajima, the shrines and temples of Nikkō glitter with carved and lacquered detail around the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yama-dera climbs a rocky hillside in Yamagata, and Nageire-dō at Sanbutsu-ji sits wedged into a cliff face on Mount Mitoku.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Itsukushima Shrine | Shinto shrine | |
| 2 | Kiyomizu-dera | Temple | ✓ |
| 3 | Tōdai-ji Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 4 | Kinkaku-ji Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 5 | Ginkaku-ji Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 6 | Hōryū-ji | Temple | ✓ |
| 7 | Byōdō-in Temple | Temple | ✓ |
| 8 | Yama-dera (Risshaku-ji) | Temple | |
| 9 | Sanjūsangen-dō Temple | Temple | |
| 10 | Shrines and Temples of Nikkō | Temple | ✓ |
| 11 | Saihō-ji (Moss Temple) | Temple | ✓ |
| 12 | Sanbutsu-ji (Nageire-dō) | Temple | |
| 13 | Chūson-ji Konjikidō | Temple |
01 Itsukushima Shrine
Japan · 15.2 km from Hiroshima34.296° N 132.320° E
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay The O-torii is the ninth gate on this spot and was raised in 1875. It stands about 16.8 metres high, its main pillars of camphor wood, about 9.9 metres round, with a roof of cypress bark and the whole body lacquered vermilion. Remarkably, it is not sunk into the seabed: four smaller supporting legs make it a ryobu-style torii, and it stays upright under its own weight. At high tide it appears to float; at low tide the bay drains and it is possible to walk out to its base, and at night the gate is lit. The island around it is worth time too: deer roam its streets, and a ropeway and hiking trails climb Mount Misen, its highest peak, which rises behind the shrine.
Did you know? Gaps are deliberately left between the floorboards of the corridors so that rising seawater can pass through instead of lifting the boards off.
02 Kiyomizu-dera
Japan · 5.3 km from Kyoto34.995° N 135.785° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay This is one of Kyoto's busiest sights, and the approach streets of Kiyomizu-zaka and Chawan-zaka are lined with souvenir shops; the stepped lanes of Sannen-zaka and Ninen-zaka lead north towards Gion. Early morning is the quietest time. The temple is especially crowded at New Year and during Obon in summer, when food and souvenir stalls fill the grounds.
Did you know? The temple complex has burned down nine times, the first recorded fire dating to 1063.
03 Tōdai-ji Temple
Japan · 35.3 km from Ōtsu34.689° N 135.840° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by daeron from Pixabay The statue and its hall haven't survived intact. The hall burned during the Genpei War in 1180, when Taira clan forces torched the temple complex as part of a civil war, and a later fire in 1567, during a different round of civil conflict, left the Great Buddha exposed to the open sky for over a century before anyone rebuilt around it again. The hall standing today dates only to 1709, and was deliberately built at about two-thirds the footprint of the original — meaning the vast hall that still dwarfs most visitors is, on paper, the smaller replacement.
Did you know? The original complex had two pagodas of roughly 100 metres, among the tallest structures of their age; both were later destroyed, reportedly by an earthquake.
04 Kinkaku-ji Temple
Japan · 2 km from Kyoto35.039° N 135.728° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by siamkop from Pixabay The pavilion was rebuilt between 1952 and 1955 as a careful copy of the original — but a later restoration went further than replication. In the 1980s, workers reapplied the gold leaf roughly five times thicker than what had covered the building before the fire, using around 20 kilograms of gold. The building visitors photograph today is, by that measure, more lavishly gilded than the one Yoshimitsu himself ever lived beside.
Did you know? During the Onin War of 1467–1477 every other building in the complex burned, and the pavilion was the only one to survive until 1950.
05 Ginkaku-ji Temple
Japan · 4.6 km from Kyoto35.027° N 135.798° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay The temple is at the northern end of the Philosopher's Walk, a stone path along a cherry-lined canal named for the Kyoto University philosophers Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, who are said to have walked it daily. It runs about 30 minutes south to Nanzen-ji, passing Hōnen-in and other temples, and is especially crowded in cherry blossom season. Arrive early to see the garden quietly.
Did you know? The Dōjinsai is traditionally regarded as the prototype of the four-and-a-half-mat room later standard for the Japanese tea ceremony.
06 Hōryū-ji
Japan · 22.8 km from Osaka34.614° N 135.734° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
ONO Masanobu · CC0 Hōryū-ji stands in the small town of Ikaruga in Nara Prefecture, on the plain between Nara and Osaka where Prince Shōtoku once had his palace.
Did you know? During the Second World War large parts of the temple were dismantled and hidden in the hills around Nara for safekeeping.
07 Byōdō-in Temple
Japan · 14.1 km from Ōtsu34.889° N 135.808° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jamie_nakamura from Pixabay The Hōshōkan museum, opened in 2001 and set largely underground so as not to compete with the hall, holds the originals of the rooftop phoenixes, the temple bell and 26 of the Bodhisattvas on Clouds, all National Treasures. Uji is famous for its green tea, and the temple's own tea room, Toka, serves tea from local fields within the precinct.
Did you know? The phoenix motif of the hall also appears on Japan's 10,000-yen banknote, alongside the hall's long presence on the 10-yen coin.
08 Yama-dera (Risshaku-ji)
Japan · 11.3 km from Yamagata38.313° N 140.437° E
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 Yama-dera is above all a place of sound and silence. In 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō climbed the mountain and wrote one of his best-known haiku here, about the cry of cicadas soaking into the rocks; in summer the insects still drown out every other noise, and the cicadas of Yama-dera are listed among the 100 Soundscapes of Japan. At the top, the Godaidō, an open hall built out over the cliff edge, gives the classic view down over the valley and the village below. A museum dedicated to Bashō stands on the hill across the valley.
Did you know? Each of the stone steps to the inner sanctuary is said to extinguish one worldly desire, so the climb itself is a form of ascetic practice.
09 Sanjūsangen-dō Temple
Japan · 5.3 km from Kyoto34.988° N 135.772° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 In front of the thousand Kannon stand the twenty-eight guardian deities, many of them Hindu gods absorbed into Buddhism, carved with startling realism, and at either end the wind god Fujin with his bag of winds and the thunder god Raijin with his ring of drums, images that have become emblems of Japanese art. The exceptional length of the veranda outside gave rise to a tradition of archery: from the early seventeenth century, archers in the Toshiya contest tried to shoot as many arrows as possible along its full length. The custom lives on in a festival held on a Sunday in January, when some two thousand archers, many of them young people in kimono, compete in the temple grounds.
Did you know? Emperor Go-Shirakawa, for whom the hall was founded, was buried in 1192 in a Lotus Sutra hall on the temple's east side.
10 Shrines and Temples of Nikkō
Japan · 31.9 km from Utsunomiya36.748° N 139.611° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ArvidO from Pixabay The other parts of the ensemble are quieter and just as fine. Rinnō-ji, a temple of the Tendai school, keeps in its Sanbutsudō hall three gilded statues — Amida, the thousand-armed Kannon and the horse-headed Kannon — understood as Buddhist forms of the three mountain deities worshipped at Futarasan Shrine. Rinnō-ji also cares for the Taiyū-in, the mausoleum of Iemitsu himself, completed in 1653 on the hillside near his grandfather's shrine. And at the entrance to the sanctuary the arched wooden Shinkyō bridge, in its present form from 1904, marks the threshold between the town and the sacred ground.
Did you know? According to legend, Shōdō crossed the raging Daiya River on two snakes, red and blue, which a deity turned into a bridge for him.
11 Saihō-ji (Moss Temple)
Japan · 7.3 km from Kyoto34.992° N 135.684° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Ivanoff~commonswiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 The famous carpet, however, is partly an accident of time. During the Edo period the monastery could not afford to maintain its grounds, floods damaged them repeatedly, and moss spread on its own, especially in the Meiji era (1868–1912). What Musō intended as a garden of water, stone and sand became a garden of moss. Several tea houses stand in the grounds, among them the Shōnan-tei, whose origins go back to the 14th century. Since 1977 the temple has admitted visitors only by advance application, and a visit begins not in the garden but in the hall, with a period of sutra copying — so the garden is seen slowly and by relatively few people at a time.
Did you know? In 1342 Emperor Kōgon visited the garden accompanied by Ashikaga Takauji, the first shogun of the Muromachi shogunate.
12 Sanbutsu-ji (Nageire-dō)
Japan · 27.6 km from Tottori35.399° N 133.956° E
Saigen Jiro · CC0 Seeing it is a pilgrimage in the old sense, because the mountain is treated as a training ground rather than a viewpoint. Beyond the main hall a steep path climbs over roots and bare rock, past a series of smaller halls including the Monju-do and Jizo-do, whose verandas hang out over the void, to a point from which the Nageire-do can be seen across a gully. The temple checks visitors' footwear and will sell straw sandals to those in unsuitable shoes, does not allow anyone to climb alone, and asks that hands be kept free. The round trip from the reception takes around one and a half to two hours; the trail closes in winter and whenever it rains or snows.
Did you know? Its principal statue, a wooden Zao Gongen now kept in the treasure hall, held a document inside dated 1168 and is attributed to the sculptor Kokei.
13 Chūson-ji Konjikidō
Japan39.001° N 141.100° E
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 metres on each side, under a pyramidal roof clad in wooden tiles. Inside, four pillars are encrusted with mother-of-pearl and maki-e lacquer depicting floral scrolls and 48 bodhisattvas, a rare case in Japan of Buddhist figures rendered in lacquer rather than paint. Three altars, decorated with gilt openwork metal, peacock panels and inlays that include ivory from African elephants brought through northern trade routes, each carry an Amida triad flanked by six Jizō and two guardian kings. Beneath them rest Kiyohira, his son Motohira and his grandson Hidehira, together with the head of his great-grandson Yasuhira.
Did you know? X-ray study of the mummies in 1950 showed that one of the lords had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that left one side of his body paralysed.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful temples in Japan?
- On our list, Itsukushima Shrine ranks first, followed by Kiyomizu-dera and Tōdai-ji Temple.
- What is the difference between a shrine and a temple in Japan?
- Shrines (jinja) belong to Shinto and are usually entered through a torii gate; temples (tera, often ending in -ji) are Buddhist and typically have a main hall housing Buddha images. Many sites mix both traditions.
- What is the oldest wooden building in the world?
- Hōryū-ji in Nara holds some of the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world; its main hall and five-storey pagoda date from around the late seventh century.
- Is the Golden Pavilion really covered in gold?
- Yes. The upper two floors of Kinkaku-ji are covered in gold leaf. The present building is a 1955 reconstruction, made after the original was burned down in 1950.
- How many temples are on this list in Japan?
- The list covers 13 temples.