Temple-heavy Kyoto presenting a unique challenge for travelers looking for Muslim prayer rooms

Kyoto City Tourism Association extends help to those looking for a place to pray the Islamic way.

With a surge in the number of foreign tourists visiting Kyoto, the city has had to consider issues such as managing crowding on public transportation and educating visitors on expected etiquette. There’s another factor that’s recently been drawing attention, though, which is access to Muslim prayer rooms.

The Islamic faith calls for believers to pray several times a day, but with Japan not having many large Muslim communities, mosques are few and far between, meaning that most Muslim tourists will need to make use of a prayer room, or musalla, instead. Though not a matter of course, Muslim prayer rooms can be found at some public and commercial facilities in Japan, as well as some hotels and transportation hubs, such as major airports.

However, Kyoto presents a unique situation. Whereas visitors to other top destinations in Japan, such as Tokyo or Osaka, may spend their days at shopping centers, amusement parks, museums, and other secular facilities, Kyoto’s major attractions are its Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, which are so numerous that they can easily fill up a tourist’s entire sightseeing itinerary. Buddhism and Shinto, especially in the modern age, have no rules against travelers of other faiths, or even people with no religious faith at all, visiting, and even many Japanese travelers visit temples and shrines as much for their historical significance and architectural/landscaping beauty as for religious fervor. However, this relaxed, accepting attitude generally doesn’t extend so far as for temple and shrines to set up prayer rooms for other religions within their own temple/shrine grounds.

Geographically, many of Kyoto’s most famous temples and shrines are on the outer edges of the downtown area, and while there are shops and restaurants nearby, there aren’t many large-scale commercial centers or public facilities of the type that have a musalla. Those are more likely to be found closer to the downtown city center. For example, the Kansai Tourist Information Center Kyoto, located a block away from Kyoto Station, has a prayer room that sees more than 100 worshippers a day during busy seasons.

Statistics from the Japan National Tourism Organization show that during the first six months of 2025, Japan had an increase of 30 percent compared to the same period in 2024 for visitors from the Muslim-majority nations of Malayasia and Indonesia, with over 300,000 visitors from each country. Visitors from the Middle East were also up 53 percent, to roughly 115,000 people, during the first half of this year.

It should be pointed out that there hasn’t been a swell in angry complaints from Muslim visitors demanding that Kyoto provide more prayer rooms, nor have there been calls for temples and shrines to install them. Rather, the increasing number of visitors who’ll be looking for prayer rooms is simply a situation that the city is aware of, and likely to be part of discussion when planning new public/travel facilities or making renovations. For the time being, though, the Kyoto City Tourism Association has a list of prayer rooms on its website here.

Source: Kyoto Shimbun via Yahoo! Japan News, Kyoto City Tourism Association
Top image: Pakutaso
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