The shrines on Tokyo department-store roofs, seven floors above the shopping

Most of Tokyo's older department stores keep something on the roof that has nothing to do with retail: a small shrine, fenced, with a stone fox or a pair of lions and a wooden box for coins. Nothing on the floor directory prepares you for it. You come across it past the garden furniture and the vending machines, and once you know it is there you start checking the roof of every old building in the city.

Why they are up there

Merchant houses in Edo kept a tutelary shrine somewhere on the property, and when the shop eventually became a seven-storey building the shrine went up with it rather than being dissolved. At Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi the roof holds a branch of Mimeguri-jinja (三囲神社), the shrine the Mitsui family had long patronised across the river in Mukōjima. The reasoning is old and entirely practical: the ground floor was needed for selling.

How to find one

Take the elevator to the top floor, then look for the stairs or the door marked 屋上 (okujō, roof). The best odds are the pre-war names around Nihonbashi and Ginza; Matsuya Ginza keeps Ryūkō Fudōson (龍光不動尊) up there among the potted plants and the folding chairs. Roof access follows store hours, so aim for late morning on a weekday, when the space belongs to two or three people eating a convenience-store lunch and nobody else.

What to do when you get there

The etiquette is the same as at street level and takes about twenty seconds: coin in the box, bow twice, clap twice, bow once. There is rarely a water basin on a roof and nobody expects you to go looking for one. Say whatever you came to say, step aside so the next person can reach the rope, and then go back down to the floor that sells socks.

A shrine on the eighth floor is still a shrine. The elevator changes nothing about it.

屋上の神社も、地上の神社と同じように手を合わせればいい。