Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa: History, Sights and Hours

Early on March 18, 628, the temple says, two brothers fishing the Sumida River found a statue of Kannon in their net. In 645 a priest named Shokai built a hall for it and, after a dream, hid the statue away, and by Senso-ji’s account no one has looked at it since, not even its chief priests. Every gate, lantern and tower you will photograph here surrounds an image nobody gets to see.

Senso-ji (also written Sensoji, and known as Asakusa Kannon) is a Buddhist temple in Asakusa, in Tokyo’s Taito City, dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy. Its own English site calls it the oldest temple in Tokyo. Entry is free, the main hall is open from 6 a.m. (6:30 a.m. from October to March) to 5 p.m., and Asakusa Station is about five minutes away on foot on each of the four lines that stop there.

At a glance

Where	2-3-1 Asakusa, Taito City. About 5 minutes on foot from Asakusa Station: Ginza, Toei Asakusa (Exit A4), Tobu Skytree and Tsukuba Express lines
Main hall	6 a.m.–5 p.m.; opens at 6:30 a.m. from October to March
After dark	Main hall, five-story pagoda, Hozomon and Kaminarimon lit from sunset to 11 p.m. every day
Cost	Free to enter
Don’t miss	The dragon carved under the Kaminarimon lantern and the two dragon statues behind the gate; the giant straw sandals on Hozomon; Kawabata Ryushi’s dragon on the main hall ceiling
Etiquette	Palms together, no clapping; the temple suggests chanting “Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu”
Dates to know	Jan 1–7, New Year visits; third weekend of May, Sanja Matsuri (Asakusa Shrine); Dec 13 at 2 p.m., the stand-in Kannon is shown; Dec 17–19, battledore market
Official site	senso-ji.jp/english

Checked Nov 8, 2026, against Senso-ji’s official site (English and Japanese pages), Asakusa Shrine’s site and GO TOKYO. Free entry per the travel guide Good Luck Trip, whose listing the temple supervises (updated Mar 6, 2026).

How old is Senso-ji, and why is its Kannon never shown?

Senso-ji traces itself back almost 1,400 years, to the statue’s appearance in 628; the first hall followed in 645. In the temple’s telling, the brothers Hinokuma Hamanari and Takenari netted the statue, and Haji no Nakatomo, headman of the village that became Asakusa, realized what it was, took up Buddhism and turned his house into a temple.

The statue stays hidden because Shokai, after his dream, made it a secret image, and the temple has kept his rule ever since. It is still in the main hall, inside a gold-leafed shrine at the center of the inner sanctum, behind several layers of locked cases.

Since nobody has seen it, nobody can measure it. The figure you will read elsewhere, about 5 cm (one sun eight bu), is in the temple’s words one of the popular theories handed down since the Edo period.

What visitors can see is a stand-in. Ennin (794–864), the monk the temple credits with restoring Senso-ji, carved a matching Kannon, the omaedachi (“the one standing in front”). Think of it as an understudy that goes on once a year: at 2 p.m. on Dec 13, after the inner shrine is cleaned, the doors open for a ceremony, then close under seal.

The river end of the story is still marked. Komagatado, a hall beside Komagata Bridge on the Sumida, stands where the temple says the statue came ashore. The present hall dates from 2003; a stone in its grounds, set up in 1693, banned fishing along that stretch of the river.

What to see at Senso-ji, from the Thunder Gate to the main hall

Walk in through Kaminarimon, follow the shopping street Nakamise to the second gate, Hozomon, and cross the courtyard to the main hall, with the five-story pagoda on your left.

Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate

The gate’s full name is Furaijinmon, after its statues of Fujin, god of wind, and Raijin, god of thunder, which the temple says guard the grounds against storms and floods. The red lantern under its roof is 3.9 m tall and weighs about 700 kg; the current one went up in April 2020. Stand beneath it and look up: a dragon is carved into its base.

The gate is younger than it looks. A fire that spread from neighboring Tawaramachi destroyed it in 1865, and it was not rebuilt for 95 years. The present concrete gate went up in 1960, paid for by Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Matsushita Electric, now Panasonic.

Then turn around. On the back stand two dragon gods, Tenryu and Kinryu, carved from Kiso cypress by Hirakushi Denchu and Sugawara Yasuo and donated in 1978. They face the temple, so you meet them only after passing through.

Nakamise

Nakamise is the approach itself: about 250 m of red-painted shops between Kaminarimon and Hozomon. It is said to have begun around 1685, when the temple let local residents open stalls in return for sweeping the grounds, rent paid in labor. Today’s concrete shop rows went up in 1925, after the 1923 earthquake, and were repaired after the 1945 air raid left only their shells.

Hozomon

The second gate, 21.7 m tall, holds two Nio, the guardian kings that give it its other name, Niomon. It was rebuilt in 1964 with a donation from the industrialist Yonetaro Otani and his wife, and renamed Hozomon, “treasure-house gate,” because it also stores the temple’s scriptures and treasures. Among them is a Yuan-dynasty edition of the Buddhist canon, a national Important Cultural Property.

Look for the giant straw sandals (waraji) on the side of the gate that faces the main hall. Volunteers from Murayama, in Yamagata Prefecture, offered the current pair in October 2018, the eighth offering since 1941. Each sandal is 4.5 m tall and weighs 500 kg, the prefecture says; the temple puts the straw used at 2,500 kg and says the sandals show the strength of the Nio.

The main hall

Before the hall, on the right, is the water pavilion. Its dragon statue is by the sculptor Takamura Koun and was installed in August 1903; it once stood in a fountain behind the main hall.

The hall is a 1958 rebuild. Its predecessor, built in 1649 under the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, was a National Treasure from 1907 and came through the 1923 earthquake, only to burn in the air raid of March 10, 1945. Since 2010 the concrete hall has worn about 89,000 titanium roof tiles, a third of the weight of the clay tiles they replaced.

Inside, look up. Kawabata Ryushi painted the dragon at the center of the ceiling, and Domoto Insho the celestial beings and falling petals on either side, each panel 6.4 by 4.9 m.

The five-story pagoda

The pagoda stands southwest of the hall, 53 m tall including the building it stands on, which holds memorial halls. Rebuilt in steel and concrete in 1973, it keeps relics of the Buddha on its top level, received from the Isurumuniya temple in Sri Lanka in 1966. It is not open to sightseers: as a rule, the temple admits only families with memorial tablets there and people booking memorial services.

Nitenmon and Bentenyama

Nitenmon, the temple’s east gate, dates from about 1649 and is a national Important Cultural Property. It began as the gate to a Toshogu shrine that once stood in the grounds; when the Meiji government separated Shinto and Buddhism, its Shinto guardian statues went to Asakusa Shrine, and the gate took its present name.

On Bentenyama, a low hill southeast of the main hall, hangs one of the bells that told the time in Edo. It was recast in 1692 on the orders of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, and a priest still strikes it every morning at 6.

Are Senso-ji and Asakusa Shrine the same?

No. Asakusa Shrine, right next to the main hall, is a Shinto shrine to the three men of the temple’s founding story: the brothers Hamanari and Takenari, and Haji no Nakatomo.

Until the Meiji era it was called Sanja Gongen. After the new government ordered Shinto and Buddhism separated, it became Sanja Myojinsha in 1868 and Asakusa Shrine in 1873, the shrine says. Its halls, donated by Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1649, escaped fires, war and the 1923 earthquake and have been an Important Cultural Property since 1951, three centuries older than the temple’s main hall next door.

The difference shows in how you pray. GO TOKYO, the city’s official travel site, notes that you should not clap at a temple, because clapping belongs to Shinto shrines. For a shrine on a much larger scale, see our guide to Meiji Shrine.

The Sanja Matsuri, on the third Saturday and Sunday of May, is the shrine’s festival, not the temple’s. Senso-ji’s own page on it says it began in 1312 as a boat festival on the Sumida, with the portable shrines (mikoshi) carried aboard. It was held around March 18, the day the statue appeared, until it moved to May in the Meiji era. On the Saturday, about 100 neighborhood mikoshi are carried through Asakusa, and on the Sunday the shrine’s own three.

When is the best time to visit Senso-ji, and can you go at night?

Go early or go after dark. The main hall opens at 6 a.m. (6:30 a.m. from October to March), and the main hall, pagoda, Hozomon and Kaminarimon are lit every evening from sunset to 11 p.m., as they have been since Oct 1, 2003. JNTO, Japan’s national tourism organization, suggests a walk through the grounds during the illumination. Taito City’s tourism site adds that there are fewer people than by day, and that the closed Nakamise shops show the paintings on their shutters.

Is it open 24 hours? The temple publishes hours only for the main hall, which closes at 5 p.m.; after that, you see the buildings from outside. At 6 a.m., listen for the bell on Bentenyama.

These dates come from the temple unless noted:

• Jan 1–7: New Year visits (hatsumode). On Dec 31 the grounds fill from early evening; the bell rings in the new year at midnight, then members of a group called the Hyakuhachi-kai strike it 108 times, about 40 minutes’ work.
• March 18 and Oct 18: the Golden Dragon Dance, created in 1958 for the new main hall: a dragon about 18 m long and 88 kg, worked by eight people, numbers that echo the 18th, Kannon’s day each month.
• Second Sunday of April, the Sanja Matsuri, and Nov 3: the White Heron Dance.
• Third weekend of May: the Sanja Matsuri (Asakusa Shrine).
• July 9–10: Shiman-rokusen-nichi, when stalls sell potted hozuki, the lantern plant.
• Dec 13, 2 p.m.: the stand-in Kannon is shown.
• Dec 17–19: the year’s last Kannon fair, with the battledore (hagoita) market. It grew out of the Edo-period year-end market, where stalls sold goods for the New Year.

How do you pray at Senso-ji?

Rinse your hands and mouth at the water pavilion, then stand before the main hall, put your palms together and pray quietly. The temple’s English page suggests chanting “Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu,” which it translates as “I place my trust in Bodhisattva Kannon.”

The temple’s four steps at the water pavilion use one ladleful:

1. Hold the ladle in your right hand and rinse your left hand.
2. Switch hands and rinse your right.
3. Take the ladle in your right hand again, pour water into your left palm and rinse your mouth. Never touch the ladle with your lips.
4. Tip the ladle upright so the last of the water runs down the handle, and put it back.

In front of the main hall stands the jokoro, a large incense burner, and Taito City’s tourism site suggests standing in its smoke before you pray. If you offer incense (osenko), JNTO advises putting out the flame with a wave of the hand, not your breath. At the hall, GO TOKYO’s advice is to place a small offering in the box and bow lightly. Inside the halls, follow the signs on photography.

Seal stamps (goshuin) are issued at Yogodo, on the west side of the grounds. Senso-ji is stop 13 on the Bando pilgrimage of 33 Kannon temples and stop 1 on the Edo 33 Kannon route.

If you go

1. Arrive. Take any line to Asakusa Station (on the Toei Asakusa Line, use Exit A4). The temple has no parking.
2. Start with the view (optional). Taito City’s Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center, in front of Kaminarimon, has a free 8th-floor terrace (9 a.m.–10 p.m.) looking over Asakusa and Tokyo Skytree.
3. Walk in. Kaminarimon and its dragons, Nakamise, Hozomon, the water pavilion, the main hall.
4. Loop the edges. The pagoda and Yogodo to the west; Asakusa Shrine beside the hall; Nitenmon, the east gate; Bentenyama to the southeast.
5. End at the river. Komagatado, by Komagata Bridge, is where the story starts.

For wheelchair users, the temple’s FAQ notes an elevator to the left of the main hall as you face it, and flat grounds. Multipurpose toilets are on the right side of Hozomon and at the back of the main hall.

Also in Asakusa is Hanayashiki, an amusement park that calls itself Japan’s oldest (our Hanayashiki guide). The Tobu Skytree Line reaches Tokyo Skytree Station in about three minutes (Tokyo Skytree guide), and the Ginza Line runs to Ueno in about five, for Ueno Park and the Tokyo National Museum.

Senso-ji from home

You can watch the temple without a plane ticket. The Japanese homepage of Senso-ji’s website carries two live YouTube cameras, one on the main hall side and one at Kaminarimon.

For the gate as it looked before the 1865 fire, find Hiroshige’s print Kinryuzan Temple, Asakusa (1856) in the Brooklyn Museum’s online collection. Snow falls past the edge of the gate and its huge lantern, with the Nio gate and the pagoda beyond.

And for the sound, there is Matsuo Basho, who lived in Fukagawa, across the river: Hana no kumo / kane wa Ueno ka / Asakusa ka (“A cloud of blossoms. / The bell: is it Ueno’s, / or Asakusa’s?”). Senso-ji quotes the poem on its page about the bell on Bentenyama.

Every one of these views, like every visit, stops at the same locked doors.