Meiji Shrine's buildings are almost aggressively plain beside the ornate, lacquered shrines built elsewhere in Japan. The complex follows the nagare zukuri roof style in unpainted Japanese cypress under copper roofing, chosen deliberately over color and ornament, weathered now to the same soft green patina found on old temple roofs elsewhere. The most visited single structure on the grounds is not a hall at all but a gate. The great outer torii, cut from cypress found on a mountain in Taiwan, stands roughly twelve meters tall and seventeen meters wide with pillars over a meter across, the largest wooden myojin style torii in Japan; a smaller first torii nearer the shrine buildings is renewed on its own schedule, most recently rebuilt in 2022 in Yoshino cedar from Nara Prefecture after its predecessor had stood about a century, a reminder that even the largest timber here is treated as living and replaceable rather than permanent. That plainness and that renewal cycle serve the same end the surrounding forest serves: nothing at Meiji Shrine is meant to look finished, only kept.
The shrine's role in ordinary religious life has grown to match its scale. More people visit in the first days of January than at any other shrine or temple in Japan, regularly over three million hatsumode, first prayer, visitors within a matter of days. Through the rest of the year the shrine is among the most sought after venues in the country for traditional Shinto weddings, white robed processions crossing the same forecourt on quieter days, so that a site built to memorialize one emperor a century ago now marks, routinely, the private turning points of people who never knew him.