Edo

Discover Izumo Taisha's 24-meter National Treasure main shrine, home to Japan's matchmaking deity. Experience unique 4-clap worship, ancient Taisha-zukuri architecture, and the sacred gathering place of 8 million Shinto gods.

Takuhi Shrine, perched within a natural rock cavern on the slopes of Mt. Takuhi on Nishinoshima Island in the Oki Islands of Shimane Prefecture, is renowned for its extraordinary setting where sacred architecture merges with the mountain itself. The main hall, prefabricated in Osaka in 1732 and assembled on site, together with the connecting hall and worship hall, forms the oldest surviving shrine complex in the Oki Islands, designated as an Important Cultural Property of Japan in 1992. Revered for centuries as the guardian deity of maritime safety across the Sea of Japan, the shrine was famously depicted by ukiyo-e masters Hiroshige and Hokusai.

The Former Dōmen Family Residence in Yoshika Town, Shimane Prefecture, is an Important Cultural Property of Japan that authentically preserves the living conditions of ordinary farming families during the Edo period. This remarkably rare surviving example of a modest common farmer's dwelling features a thatched hipped-gable roof and compact design reflecting the practical needs of rural mountain life in the Iwami region.

An 18th-century farmhouse in Unnan, Shimane, and an Important Cultural Property. Its great hall is held open without posts by raised nobori-bari beams.

On the rugged island of Dōgo in Japan's remote Oki Islands stands Mizuwakasu Shrine, the highest-ranked shrine of the former Oki Province. Its Main Hall, rebuilt in 1795, is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property celebrated for its rare Oki-zukuri architectural style — a hybrid found nowhere else in Japan. With its dramatic thatched gable roof, ancient pine-lined approach, classical sumo ring, and biennial festival of yamabiki and yabusame, this shrine offers travelers a profound encounter with island spirituality and over a thousand years of recorded history.

The ceremonial gate of the Itohara ironmaster house, a late-Edo timber gate roofed in tile with flanking walls, opened only for the lord of Matsue's formal visits.

The late-Edo rice storehouse of the Itohara house, oldest of the family's stores. Registered farmers who held samurai rank, they built wealth on rice as well as iron.

The plainest of Sasaya's four registered buildings in Tsuwano, and the one with the best door: kakeko-nuri plasterwork whose stepped edges leave fire no way in.

A tiny Edo storehouse built to be looked at: namako tile wall base, copper shutters, a crest on top. It makes the Honmachi streetscape with the shop it stocked.

Thick fireproof walls, one grilled window, and inside a six-mat tatami room with polished log rafters. A merchant family's tea-room sealed in a strongbox, Tsuwano.

Fourteen meters of frontage on Honmachi in Tsuwano. Plastered okabe walls bury the frame, udatsu parapets rise at each end, and the ground floor still sells kimono.

The storehouse at Shimomori Brewery in Tsuwano is the oldest of the seven, dating to the late Edo period. It sets red Sekishu tiles against white plaster.

Standing just outside the gate of Miho Shrine in the historic port town of Mihonoseki in Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture, this stone well was built in 1861 in the final years of the Edo period. Its cylindrical shaft about 3.8 meters deep is crowned by an unusual octagonal parapet of stone slabs. Known as the Well of Gratitude thanks to a legend in which the deity Miho Daimyojin revealed its location during a severe drought, it quenched the thirst of sailors on kitamaebune cargo ships and pilgrims alike, and is registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan.