Sensoji temple, also known as Asakusa Kannon and located in Tokyo?s Asakusa district, is the city?s oldest religious building and one of its most colorful and popular.
With roughly 20 million annual visitors, it?s also the most visited-temple in Japan and the most-frequented spiritual site in the world.

Dedicated to Kannon Bosatsu (Avalokite?vara), the merciful nirvana achiever and the Bodhisattva of compassion, Sensoji boasts an extensive complex including the main temple building and a 5-story pagoda, as well as an on-site shopping street, the Nakamise-d?ri.
History of Sensoji Temple
The history of Sensoji stretches back to the year 628, when legend states that two local brothers discovered a golden statue of Kannon in the Sumida River while fishing. Although they put the statue back into the water, it apparently magically kept returning to them. Because of this seemingly divine occurrence, the chief of the then-small village of Asakusa decided to remodel his own home into a shrine that could house the statue and encourage locals to worship it. The earliest iteration of the Sensoji temple was completed in 645.

The temple achieved further symbolic status in the 1600s when Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu designated the site as a family temple to serve as spiritual protection against potential invaders from the northeast.
Later, during the 10th and 11th centuries, Sensoji received visits from influential samurai warlords from the Taira and Minamoto families ,who decided to rebuild ...