There are thirty-nine shukubō along the approach. The main approach to Zenkō-ji is lined on both sides with storehouse-built merchant houses and pilgrim lodgings, and turning into the side lanes brings you to kura now occupied by workshops and bookshops. A shukubō is lodging belonging to the temple itself: Zenkō-ji has thirty-nine of them, operated for the use of people who have come to worship rather than for general accommodation.

Reception runs daily from nine until half past four, and the condition that guests should be there to worship has been kept rather than quietly dropped, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. The merchant houses face the approach with their frontages, and it is the buildings behind them — the storehouses along the side lanes — that have been given new uses, so the main street and the back lanes are at quite different stages of change. The Shinkansen reaches Tokyo in about ninety minutes, and the centre has hospitals and shopping enough that daily life does not require leaving the city.

Lodging at a temple gate has survived on a different footing from the hotel trade. Restricting guests to worshippers costs occupancy, but the relationship with the temple provides something a hotel does not have, and the result is that these houses ride economic cycles differently from ordinary inns. Thirty-nine is a large number of houses to have kept in operation under that condition. It has been kept because the relationship underneath it has not been broken, and the moment it were, the arithmetic would change completely.