How other temple and shrine sites compare
There are many sites covering Japanese temples, shrines and cemeteries. We cannot hide how much smaller ours is. Rather than hide it, we set out plainly what is different. Every figure was measured on the date shown below.
The figures below were read directly from each site on 2026-10-12.
Catalogue size
| Site | Listings | Primary use |
|---|---|---|
| Shinjiin Bukkaku Map shrine-temple.com/ | 4,201listings | Search by prefecture, benefit, festival |
| Kamakura Shosho www.kamakura-net.co.jp/ | 10,000+cemeteries listed | End-of-life planning, grave purchase advice |
| kuyo.co.jp (us) kuyo.co.jp | 39published | Temple guides + online memorial offerings |
What each one actually does
Shinjiin Bukkaku Map
A comprehensive directory of shrines and temples across Japan, organised around prefecture, kami benefits (go利益) and annual festivals. It states outright that it covers "over 1,000 shrines, temples and goshuin seals" and does maintain per-prefecture indexes. Available in both Japanese and English. Its quiet strength is that it carries goshuin information, which makes it a useful waypoint before an actual visit. It sits in the encyclopedia register rather than answering "tell me what makes this one temple worth visiting".
Kamakura Shosho
An end-of-life information company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime market (code 6184). It does not merely host 10,000 cemetery listings: as a listed company it runs a sales organisation and reports 19,565 completed grave purchases in a year. It operates as an advisory business rather than a listing directory, which is a different shape of business from ours. The door it holds open is funeral and grave consultation, not browsing.
kuyo.co.jp (us)
We are nowhere near 4,201 or 10,000 listings, and no amount of presentation changes that. The difference is purpose. Those sites concentrate on pre-visit information — history, origins, access. Our temple guides do that too, but they are not the largest part of the site. Alongside them sits the omikuji shrine and a memorial page where a family far from the gravesite can offer flowers and incense without travelling. That is the case these directories do not serve: people living abroad, or simply too far away to make the trip. Rather than treat temple guides purely as search traffic, we put a second purpose on the same pages.
If anything here is wrong
If we have got something wrong about another site, please tell us. Correcting the record matters more to us than the claim itself, and we will check and amend.
Contact: please reach us from any localized page on kuyo.co.jp.
Site contents and listing counts are as of 2026-10-12. They may have changed since. Please verify before relying on them.