Wandering Tokyo Finding Shrines and Such

March 2, 2025

Kira Yoshinaka was a high-ranking samurai immortalized in Japan as the notorious villain in Chushingura, the story of the 47 Ronin. In truth, Kira was greatly admired as a fair and good lord.  He created a salt industry and expanded rice paddies for cultivating. This statue sits on a tiny patch of Lord Kira’s original home.

This memorial is located in the hustle and bustle of Chiyoda City. Masakado was a Heian-period provincial magnate and samurai notable for leading the first recorded uprising against the central government in Kyōto. Along with Sugawara no Michizane and Emperor Sutoku, he is often called one of the “Three Great Onryō of Japan.”

The site of Masakado’s grave is known as the Kubizuka ( “head mound”). This burial mound is believed to house the remains of Masakado’s head. People have venerated the site for centuries, and many locals regard it as a place of spiritual significance.

During the Edo period (1603–1868), the Tokugawa shogunate recognized the grave’s importance and maintained it as a sacred site. The grave’s sanctity was preserved even as Tokyo evolved into a modern metropolis.

The most common version of the story concerns Lady Oiwa of the Tamiya family, the wife of an abusive and unfaithful man named Iemon, who plots to get rid of Oiwa to marry another woman. After getting severely disfigured by the poison Iemon gives, Lady Oiwa loses her mind and dies a horrible death. Later, the vengeful ghost of Oiwa haunts and causes several deaths around Iemon, who is also killed at the end of the tale.

Interestingly, Lady Oiwa and her husband Iemon were real people and are known to have had happy marriages.

These two shrines are almost opposite each other on the same street in Shinjuku. Yotsuya was once worshipped by the real Tamiya family, but burned down in 1879 and relocated to Shinjuku. The other shrine, part of a Buddhist temple named Youunji, is more recent and dates back to the first half of the 20th century.

Matsuo Bashō is known as one of the greatest haiku poets of all time, along with Kobayashi Issa and Yosa Buson. Born in 1644, Bashō wrote nearly a thousand haiku during his lifetime including a few poetic travelogues based on his pilgrimage across Japan. This statue sits in Basho Heritage Garden looking over the Sumida River.  It is a very tiny park in a wonderfully serene setting.

A few streets down from Basho I tripped over the Hatsunemori Shrine. The shrine was built by Dokan Ota in the Bunmei era (1469-1487). It is said that it was destroyed by the Great Fire of the Meireki and moved to this area in the 2nd year of Manji (1659).

As I continued to walk I crossed this sweet little bridge.  I might not have taken much notice if it weren’t for the historic plaque.

The Shiodome Bridge was built in November 1928 as part of the reconstruction after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Initially wood the bridge was replaced with this steel girder bridge. The bridge was named after Shiobara Taisuke wo was known as the Great Man of the Year and lived in the area. He was a successful firewood and coal merchant whose tale was made into the kabuki play Shiobara Tasuke Ichidaiki, premiering in 1892.

Paris isn’t the only city with entire streets dedicated to books. Jimbōchō Book Town is one of the world’s oldest surviving and largest-scale book towns. It is said that there are at least 400 bookstores in the district, where one-third of secondhand books in all of Tokyo can be found.

Mitsukoshi was established in 1673 as a kimono shop and transformed into Japan’s first department store in 1904. In its main branch, you will find this immense sculpture. The piece was created by the artist Gengen Sato in 1960 and is intended to represent Mitsukoshi’s mokoro (sincerity). Over time, the sculpture itself has become better known as Magokoro. Crafting the massive piece took Sato and his apprentices 10 years to complete. The sculpture is carved out of 500-year-old hinoki cypress wood from Kyoto, painted with clay pigment, and decorated with gold, platinum, and jewels. Over 12,000 jewels, including diamond, jade, and agate, cover the sculpture. The sculpture stands about 36 feet, and weighs 6.8 tons.

The store is so huge that to find the Magokoro, it is easiest to enter past the two copies of the lions in Trafalgar Square installed in 1914 by then-manager Hibi Osuke.

Initially built in 1603, Nihonbashi was a wooden bridge that became the busiest point in Edo, modern-day Tokyo. In the 300 years after its original construction, the bridge burned down and was rebuilt 10 times before the current stone bridge was completed in 1911. Adorning this bridge are these bronze winged dragons by sculptor Osao Watanabe called kirin. Kirin delivers good luck or bad luck to those deserving luck of any type.

Also in Nihonbashi is this monument lost amongst the freeway and construction.

The post aided in searches for lost children. In early Japan, finding lost children was rarely successful, compounded by the not uncommon act of human trafficking. So, in 1857, concerned citizens of the town funded the construction of a “Stone Marker for Lost Children” on the side of the Ikkoku Bridge.

This stone monument, with a rectangular dent on each side, serves as a bulletin board. Parents put up posters describing their lost children on one side, while notices were posted on the other when the children with matching descriptions were found.  Others were located around Tokyo, but this is the only one to survive.