How Many Shrines in Tokyo?

I have recently been doing a lot of work on calculating the number of shrines in Tokyo. The obvious starting point was the Association of Shinto Shrine’s (ASS), a national organization overseeing about 80,000 shrines in Japan with branches in every prefecture. Its home page, jinja.in, lists the shrines registered with it by region and the Kanto page, gives a number of 3,978 for shrines in Tokyo. Jinja.in/kanto

This includes the 23 wards of Tokyo-shi, plus 37 cities and villages in what can loosely be labelled Greater Tokyo. The ASS doesn’t give a combined number for the 23 wards but the total for the numbers shown in Jinja.in/kanto/Tokyo is 1,235

Adding this to the 754 shrines in the 26 cities, 5 towns, and 6 villages gives a total of 1,989 shrines in all of Tokyo. (table 1).

This is a far cry from the 3,978 the ASS gives. Part of the discrepancy comes from the fact that the ASS sometimes lists the shrine and shrine office separately, giving two shrines for the price of one. It also sometimes gives two slightly different addresses for the same shrine and lists them separately. Sometimes there are duplicate entries for one shrine. The “adj. for duplicates” column in the table shows an actual number of 896 for shrines registered with the ASS in Tokyo’s 23 wards, 37.8% lower than the ASS’s stated 1,235.

The number of shrines in Tokyo in my database is shown in the rodsshinto column. The total for the 23 wards, 2011, is much higher then the ASS’s 1,235. There are two reasons for this discrepancy. The first is that my data includes numbers for two sets of jinja which are not included in the ASS data: one, jinja which for whatever reason are not registered with the ASS, and, two, in-ground subsidiary jinja.

I have not yet calculated the number of duplicated jinja for the cities, towns, and villages. I will do so in due course.