Shrines and Temples of Nikkō

Nikkō is less a single temple than a sacred mountain landscape: a hillside of tall cedars above the town where Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples have grown into one another for more than a thousand years. Tradition holds that the monk Shōdō Shōnin founded the first temple here in 766, and the site that UNESCO inscribed in 1999 brings together three institutions — the shrines of Tōshō-gū and Futarasan and the Buddhist temple of Rinnō-ji — with 103 buildings and structures, nine of them National Treasures of Japan. The cedars themselves belong to the monument: the forest that shades the paths was planted in the early 17th century, when the great shrine was being built.

The reason Nikkō looks the way it does is Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603. His mausoleum-shrine, Tōshō-gū, was first raised in 1617 under his son Hidetada and then enlarged by his grandson Iemitsu, whose rebuilding of 1636 gave it its present splendour. Where Japanese shrine architecture usually prizes restraint, Tōshō-gū is a deliberate display of wealth: lacquer, gold leaf and densely carved, brightly painted woodwork on every surface. Its two-storey Yōmeimon gate is so crowded with figures that it earned the nickname "the gate of sunset" — you could gaze at it until evening without tiring. Among thousands of carvings, two small ones draw crowds: the three monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil, on the stable of the sacred horses, and the sleeping cat attributed to the carver Hidari Jingorō, near the Karamon gate. A five-storey pagoda, rebuilt in 1818, hangs its central pillar free inside the tower so that it can move in an earthquake.

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.

Getting there

The shrines and temples stand on the edge of the town of Nikkō in Tochigi Prefecture, less than 1 km from the centre. Tobu Railway limited express trains run from Asakusa in Tokyo to Tobu-Nikkō Station in just under two hours; from there, local buses go to the Shinkyō stop, a short walk from the shrines. The nearest airport is Fukushima (FKS), about 90 km away, but the practical gateway is Tokyo.