Kamigamo Jinja

Quick facts

Address

339 Kamigamo Motoyama, Kita-ku, Kyoto

About this place

Kamigamo Jinja, properly Kamo Wakeikazuchi Jinja, is in Kita, Kyoto, and enshrines Kamo Wakeikazuchi no Okami. The benefits the shrine lists are: warding off misfortune, warding off unlucky directions, good fortune, protection from all eight quarters, warding off lightning, warding off calamity, victory — and the guardianship of the electrical industry. Its extensive grounds, including two National Treasures and forty-one Important Cultural Properties, are all inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage.

Origin and history

The deity of Kamigamo Jinja is Kamo Wakeikazuchi no Okami.

The benefits the shrine lists are: warding off misfortune, warding off unlucky directions, good fortune, protection from all eight quarters, warding off lightning, warding off calamity, victory, and the guardianship of the electrical industry.

Its extensive grounds, including two National Treasures and forty-one Important Cultural Properties, are all inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage.

What it is locally associated with

• Power spotProtection & SafetySkill & Mastery

  From lightning to the electrical industry

  The shrine lists warding off misfortune, unlucky directions, the eight quarters, lightning and calamity, victory — and the guardianship of the electrical industry.

  documented history

• Origin

  Thunder in the deity’s name

  The enshrined deity is Kamo Wakeikazuchi no Okami — thunder is part of the name.

  documented history

• Power spot

  The whole grounds are World Heritage

  The grounds, with two National Treasures and forty-one Important Cultural Properties, are all inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage.

  documented history

One item in this shrine’s list belongs to a different century from the rest. Warding off misfortune, unlucky directions, good fortune, the eight quarters, lightning, calamity, victory — all old words. And then, last: guardian of the electrical industry.

The logic holds. The deity’s name is Kamo Wakeikazuchi — thunder is in the name. So this is a shrine against lightning, and therefore a shrine for people whose work is electricity. The same deity followed its own element from the sky into the wires.

The grounds hold two National Treasures and forty-one Important Cultural Properties, and the whole of it is inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage.

Related guides

• How to visit a shrine or temple in JapanThe country-wide basics: purifying at the water basin, the two-bows-two-claps-one-bow form at shrines, and what temples do instead.
• What a "power spot" actually isA modern Japanese coinage, not a traditional religious category. Where the word came from, what it does and does not claim, and why this site uses it anyway.
• Shrine or temple?A shrine is Shinto and a temple is Buddhist, and you can usually tell at the gate. Why the line is cleaner on paper than on the ground, and what a government order in 1868 has to do with it.
• Omamori, ema, omikuji and goshuinThe four things you are most likely to receive, write, draw or be given at a shrine or temple, what each is actually for, and the one of them people most often get wrong.

Sources

1. 上賀茂神社について — 賀茂別雷神社 — Kamigamo Jinja (accessed 2026-08-13)