Bonds & Matchmaking
Places associated with bonds and matchmaking.
En-musubi, the tying of bonds, is wider than romance: several shrines say outright that it covers marriages, friendships and working relationships alike. The places tagged here state bond-tying among their own devotions, and each page shows where.
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12 placesOpen in the full map
Places in this collection
ShrineMeiji Jingu
- Health & Healing
- Protection & Safety
- Bonds & Matchmaking
A 1920 Shinto shrine in central Tokyo enshrining Emperor Meiji and Empress Shōken, set in a 70-hectare forest that was planted from scratch and is visited today for prayers about bonds, protection and health.
ShrineKanda Myojin
- Career & Work
- Family & Home
- Money & Prosperity
A Chiyoda shrine that served as the guardian shrine of all Edo, enshrining three deities between them associated with business prosperity, good matches and warding off misfortune, and these days selling a charm for information security.
ShrineTokyo Daijingu
- Family & Home
- Love & Romance
- Money & Prosperity
A Chiyoda shrine founded in 1880 as a Tokyo branch of Ise, known as "Tokyo's O-Ise-sama" and visited above all for prayers about relationships, an association the shrine itself explains through the three deities of creation enshrined here.
ShrineHie Shrine
- Career & Work
- Fertility & Children
- Money & Prosperity
A shrine on a wooded rise in Nagatacho, once the guardian of Edo Castle, whose messenger is the monkey, a pun the shrine explains itself, connecting it to warding off evil, to winning, and to the tying of bonds.
ShrineNezu Shrine
- Career & Work
- Exams & Study
- Family & Home
A Bunkyo shrine whose entire 1706 complex survives intact as an Important Cultural Property, rare in Tokyo, with an azalea hill and a tunnel of small red torii (鳥居).
TempleGotoku-ji
- Money & Prosperity
- Bonds & Matchmaking
A Sōtō Zen temple in Setagaya where thousands of white beckoning-cat figurines are left by visitors, and where the temple is careful to say the cat brings connections, not fortune.
ShrineAtago Shrine
- Career & Work
- Love & Romance
- Money & Prosperity
A shrine on a steep hill in Minato, founded in 1603 on Tokugawa Ieyasu's order as a deity against fire, and known for the stone staircase named after a rider who is said to have galloped up it.
ShrineAkasaka Hikawa Shrine
- Family & Home
- Love & Romance
- Money & Prosperity
A Minato shrine founded in 951 whose Edo-period buildings survived both the earthquake and the war, known for warding off misfortune and for the tying of bonds, and the shrine explains why it is known for each.
ShrineShiba Daijingu
- Love & Romance
- Money & Prosperity
- Protection & Safety
A Minato shrine founded in 1005 that enshrines the two deities of Ise, known in the Edo period as the Ise of the Kanto and today for a box charm sold nowhere else.
ShrineImado Shrine
- Love & Romance
- Bonds & Matchmaking
An Asakusa shrine founded in 1063 that calls itself a shrine of bond-tying, and which has run its own matchmaking gatherings since 2008.