Munakata Grand Shrine

Munakata Taisha is the head of around 6,000 Munakata shrines across Japan and one of the country's oldest centres of worship, dedicated to the three Munakata goddesses — daughters of the sun goddess Amaterasu and guardians of safe passage across the sea. The shrine is really a complex of three sites strung across the Genkai Sea: Hetsu-miya on the mainland at Tashima, Nakatsu-miya on the island of Oshima, and Okitsu-miya on the remote sacred island of Okinoshima. Hetsu-miya, the main hall, is freely open to visitors and is where most people pray and explore the wooded precinct. Okinoshima, however, is so sacred that it remains off-limits to the general public — for centuries even setting foot there was restricted, and rituals left behind some 80,000 offerings of gold, bronze, and glass spanning the 4th to 9th centuries, earning it the nickname 'the Shosoin of the Sea.' Many of these national-treasure artifacts are displayed in the Shimpokan museum beside Hetsu-miya. The whole network was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, and the mainland shrine makes an easy and atmospheric stop on the coast north of Fukuoka.