Above the escalators: the small shrines Tokyo department stores keep on their roofs

On the top floor of a Tokyo department store, past the garden centre and the shelves of pet food, there is often a door to the roof. Behind it, more frequently than the guidebooks let on, stands a shrine: a small vermilion torii, an offering box, a pair of stone foxes wearing the soot of the city.

Why a shop has a shrine on its roof

Prewar department stores — depāto (デパート) — treated their roofs as attractions in their own right, with small zoos, toy trains, and beer gardens in August. The shrines arrived by a different logic. A merchant house asked its tutelary kami for steady trade, and when the house built upward, the kami went up with it. Most of what stands today was rebuilt after 1945 and is looked after by the store's own staff, who sweep the step and change the water.

Nihonbashi and Ginza, two easy starts

At Mitsukoshi's Nihonbashi flagship, the roof holds Mimeguri Shrine (三囲神社, Mimeguri-jinja), tied to the Mitsui merchant family that founded the store, its stone lions set among the planting. A few minutes south at Mitsukoshi Ginza, the ninth-floor terrace keeps Ginza Shusse Jizōson (銀座出世地蔵尊), a Jizō figure older than nearly every building now around it. Both are reached by the same elevators the shoppers use, and neither asks for anything at the door.

What to do when you get up there

Nothing unusual is required of you. At the shrine: a coin in the box, two bows, two claps, one bow. At the Jizō, hands together and no clapping. Hours follow the store, roughly ten in the morning to eight at night, and the roof shuts in rain or strong wind, so a grey afternoon is a gamble.

屋上の神社は、店が開いている時間だけ開いている。

Ask at the ground-floor information counter for the okujō (屋上, rooftop); the floor guide beside the elevators lists it whenever there is something to see. The reward is small and exact — fifteen quiet minutes, several floors above a street you were going to walk down anyway.