Shinto sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Most of this map is a jinja and the precinct around it. Roadside torii, stone markers, offices, burial sites and former shrines are here as well. There are more than 45,000 sites worldwide. Colour represents which kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a shrine they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any shrine register.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `shinto`. We take the tag at its word and don't second-guess it from a building's architecture or its name.

Shrine furniture is left out on purpose. Komainu guardian statues and similar objects sometimes record `religion=shinto` in their own right, and a statue is not a site, so including them would count the ornament as well as the shrine it stands outside.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of site rather than the religion, because the religion is the whole map. About 80% of the dots are places of worship, meaning the jinja itself. Roughly one dot in six is a marker: a roadside or hillside shrine, a torii or a stone, something you pass rather than enter. The rest are grounds mapped as their own plot, religious buildings, offices, burial sites and former shrines, each in hundreds or fewer.

Names on this map

Almost every name here is written in Japanese. Fewer than one named site in a hundred has a name written only in the Latin alphabet. We show the local name where a site has one and an English name where a mapper has supplied one, so most of the labels on this map read in Japanese whichever language you are using the site in. About seven sites in ten have a name at all, and we draw the rest just the same.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. These are the smallest features we map anywhere: a typical footprint here is around 100 square metres, which is a structure a few metres across. The dots therefore have both a higher floor and a lower ceiling than we use elsewhere, or a typical shrine would sit at the smallest size we can draw at every zoom worth looking at.

More than half of these sites are mapped as a point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size. Here a point is often the honest mapping rather than an incomplete one, because a wayside marker has no footprint worth tracing. We also draw shrines as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide.

Where the map is empty

Nearly all of these sites are in Japan, and that is close to the truth rather than a gap in the mapping. Shinto shrines stand overwhelmingly in Japan, and Japan is mapped in great detail. Shrines built by Japanese communities abroad, in Hawaii, Brazil and elsewhere, number a few hundred, and at world zoom they disappear under Japan. Elsewhere an empty area usually means there is nothing of this kind to map.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A small shrine that has been taken down may stay on the map until a mapper notices.

Source and licence

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