[1] The famed Buddhist priest Nichiren Daishonin once reputedly visited the shrine to reprimand the kami Hachiman just before his execution at Shichirigahama beach.

Under heavy snow on the evening of February 12, 1219 (Jōkyū 1, 26th day of the 1st month),[note 2] shōgun Minamoto no Sanetomo was coming down from Tsurugaoka Hachimangū's Senior Shrine after assisting to a ceremony celebrating his nomination to Udaijin.

[2] The killer is often described as hiding behind the giant ginkgo, but no contemporary text mentions the tree, and this detail is likely an Edo-period invention first appeared in Tokugawa Mitsukuni's Shinpen Kamakurashi.

For his act Kugyō was himself beheaded a few hours later,[2] thus bringing the Seiwa Genji line of the Minamoto clan and their rule in Kamakura to a sudden end.

[3] The mixing of Buddhism and kami worship in shrine-temple complexes like Tsurugaoka called jingū-ji had been normal for centuries until the Meiji government decided, for political reasons, that this was to change.

[4] (According to the honji suijaku theory, Japanese kami were just local manifestations of universal buddhas, and Hachiman in particular was one of the earliest and most popular syncretic gods.

Because mixing the two religions was now forbidden, shrines and temples had to give away some of their treasures, thus damaging the integrity of their cultural heritage and decreasing the historical and economic value of their properties.

[3] Tsurugaoka Hachiman's giant Niō (仁王)} (the two wooden wardens usually found at the sides of a temple's entrance), being objects of Buddhist worship and therefore illegal where they were, had to be sold to Jufuku-ji, where they still are.

[note 3][6] The shrine also had to destroy Buddhism-related buildings, for example its shichidō garan (七堂伽藍) (a complete seven-building Buddhist temple compound), its tahōtō tower, and its midō (御堂, enshrinement hall (of a buddha)).

[7] The present location was carefully chosen as the most propitious after consulting a diviner because it had a mountain to the north (the Hokuzan (北山)), a river to the east (the Namerikawa), a great road to the west (the Kotō Kaidō (古東街道)) and was open to the south (on Sagami Bay).

This facility, originally created for the shōgun's benefit, allows one to worship at distant Yui Wakamiya (Moto Hachiman) without actually going all the way to Zaimokuza.

[8] An unusual feature of the shrine is its 1.8 km sandō (参道) (approach), which extends all the way to the ocean in Yuigahama and doubles as Wakamiya Ōji Avenue, Kamakura's main street.

The ginkgo tree that stood next to Tsurugaoka Hachimangū's stairway almost from its foundation and which appears in almost every old print of the shrine was completely uprooted and greatly damaged at 4:40 in the morning on March 10, 2010.

The tree was nicknamed kakure-ichō (隠れ銀杏, hiding ginkgo) because according to an Edo period urban legend, a now-famous assassin hid behind it before striking his victim.