Shinto sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Shinto site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — jinja and their grounds, but also roadside markers and torii, offices, burial sites and the occasional former shrine. Just under 50,000 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the kind of site it is, and its denomination where that was recorded. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Almost all of it is in one country, and that is very nearly true

99.5% of the sites on this map are in Japan. On most of this site's maps a figure like that would be a warning that you are looking at where the mappers are rather than where the thing is. Here it is close to the truth: Shinto is a Japanese religion, its shrines are overwhelmingly in Japan, and Japan is among the best-mapped countries on earth. The two effects point the same way instead of fighting each other.

It is worth stating the contrast with this site's Sikh sites map, where a concentration of the same shape is an inversion of the truth. A dense map is not automatically a distorted one; what matters is whether the density and the reality agree, and here they do.

What the figure hides is the small remainder — Shinto shrines in Hawaii, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere, built by Japanese communities abroad. There are a few hundred, they are real, and at world zoom they disappear entirely under Japan.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. Seven kinds appear:

Place of worship — the jinja itself. 80.6% of this map.
Marker — a roadside or hillside shrine, a torii, a stone marker: something you pass rather than enter. 15.8%, and by far the largest marker share of any religion map here.
Grounds — the shrine precinct mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
Religious building, office, burial site, former site — each present, in hundreds or fewer.

That marker share is the thing to understand before comparing this map with another. The Muslim sites map has 129 markers against this map's 7,774. That is not a statement about either religion's practice so much as about what gets mapped: Shinto's roadside markers are numerous, physically distinct and enthusiastically recorded in Japan. Read the difference as a difference in mapping, not in devotion.

Four sites on this map — two monasteries, a school and a community building — carry a kind with no colour of its own and are drawn in a plain grey. They are shown rather than hidden, but a legend row promising a findable class of four sites scattered across Japan would have said less than it cost. Click one and the details panel still names its kind.

Which sites count as Shinto

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `shinto`. That tag is what the mapper stated, and it is taken at its word — a building's architecture and its name are not second-guessed.

Shrine furniture is deliberately left off: komainu guardian statues and similar objects sometimes carry `religion=shinto` in their own right, but a statue is not a site, and including them would have counted the ornament as well as the shrine.

Names, and why this map is harder to check than the others

69% of the sites here carry a name, but only a fraction of those names are in the Latin alphabet — under 1% of named Shinto objects have a purely ASCII name. The map shows the local name where it has one, and an English name where a mapper has supplied one.

This has a consequence worth admitting. Every layer on this site is checked before publication partly by looking up a handful of well-known sites by name and confirming they came out right. On this layer that check is far weaker than elsewhere, because there are so few names it can be written against. The other checks — the site count, the geometry, the tile structure — are unaffected.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

These are the smallest sites on this website. The median footprint here is about 96 square metres — a structure a few metres across — which is a quarter of the median on the next-smallest religion map. The symbols therefore have both a higher floor and a much lower ceiling than other layers, or a typical shrine would sit at the smallest size the site can draw, at every zoom worth looking at.

Shrines are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. It is small enough to leave the real order intact.

56% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, the highest share of any religion map here, and they are given a nominal, typical size rather than the smallest one. On this layer a point is often the honest mapping rather than an incomplete one: a wayside marker has no footprint worth tracing.

Footprint is physical extent, not importance. A large shrine precinct covers more ground than a famous small one, and the map says nothing about which matters more to the people who use it.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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