Yasaka Jinja

Quick facts

Address

625 Gionmachi Kitagawa, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto

Spiritual entities

Susanoo no Mikoto (素盞嗚尊)

About this place

Yasaka Jinja stands in Gion, Higashiyama, Kyoto, and enshrines Susanoo. The shrine records that its founding reaches back before the capital was moved to Heian-kyo. About eleven hundred and fifty years ago, in the Heian period, the Gion festival began as a prayer that an epidemic be quelled. The shrine records that it has been venerated as a shrine for the dispelling of epidemic disease.

Origin and history

Yasaka Jinja enshrines Susanoo, and the shrine records that its founding reaches back before the move of the capital to Heian-kyo.

The Gion festival began about eleven hundred and fifty years ago, in the Heian period, from a prayer that an epidemic be quelled.

What it is locally associated with

• OriginHealth & Healing

  That the epidemic be quelled

  The Gion festival began about eleven hundred and fifty years ago from a prayer that an epidemic be quelled.

  documented history

• Power spot

  A shrine for dispelling epidemic

  The shrine records that it has been venerated for the dispelling of epidemic disease.

  documented history

• Origin

  Older than the capital

  The shrine records its founding as reaching back before the move to Heian-kyo, and gives no year.

  documented history

The devotion here is the festival itself. Gion Matsuri did not begin as a spectacle; it began as a prayer that an epidemic be quelled, some eleven hundred and fifty years ago.

Each July the floats go through the streets. Underneath the procession is one wish: that the sickness recede. However large the festival grew and however many came to watch, the reason it started is still there in the shrine’s own words.

On the year of its founding the shrine gives no date, only that it reaches back before the capital moved. This page goes no further either.

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. 八坂神社について — 八坂神社 — Yasaka Jinja (accessed 2026-08-13)