Ise

Ise is a city in central Mie Prefecture on the island of Honshū in Japan, formerly called Ujiyamada, and it is the home of Ise Grand Shrine, the most sacred Shintō shrine in Japan. The city holds the title Shinto, meaning the Holy City. It stands on the northern half of the Shima Peninsula, with flat land in the north facing Ise Bay on the Pacific Ocean and hills and mountains in the south, and most of it lies within Ise-Shima National Park. Its history is bound to the shrine, whose Inner Shrine and Outer Shrine are about six kilometres apart; the villages of Uji and Yamada that grew around them in the Edo period, when pilgrimages called o-Ise-mairi were popular, merged into the town of Ujiyamada, which became a city in 1906. Rail links raised visitor numbers to an estimated eight million in 1940. About 123,500 people lived there in 2021.