Storyboard located at junction of Adam Road/Sime Road. The site shrouded in jungle on the peninsula across the reservoir from the Singapore Island Country Club golf course. Actual ruins (wooden stumps foundation work) highly inaccessible.
Buried in the dense jungle of the MacRitchie Catchment Area are the ruins of Syonan Jinja, a Japanese shrine dating back to World War II. Built to commemorate Japanese soldiers who died fighting in the invasion of Singapore, Syonan Jinja was the location of many Japanese religious and cultural ceremonies. The original structure, built during the Japanese Occupation (1942-5), was a temple with no walls. Raised from the ground by a stone platform graduated with a few steps, the sloping temple roof rested on pillars that stood at regular intervals round the perimeter of the platform. It is believed that during rituals, worshippers would drink from a huge granite ceremonial fountain located outside the shrine.
A Shinto ceremony took place here every New Year’s Day for the few years that the shrine existed. This was marked by the ousnding of the temple bell, the arrival devotees and the presence of a Shinto priest presiding over rituals. After the proceedings were completed here, the worshippers moved on for a second ceremony at Syonan Chureito, a war memorial for the Japanese Solders located at Bukit Batok.
Syonan Jinja was destroyed when the Japanese Occupation ended in 1945. Crumbling granite steps what once led to the shrine are visible as well as the stone fountain. Of the temple building length of the building and several square pits in the ground that probably once supported pillars.
Today, remnants of the shrine are covered by jungle vegetation. As it is no longer accessible, Syonan Jinja is best seen through old photographs and drawings by the Japanese military as well as the POWs who helped build the shrine.