Sakurai Shrine

This guide to Sakurai Shrine in Fukuoka centers on 1632, the year carpenters raised the main hall in front of you and the year its founder, second Fukuoka lord Kuroda Tadayuki, was hauled before the shogunate on suspicion of treason. It follows his chief retainer Kuriyama Daizen, who burned an unauthorized warship called the Phoenix and then rode to Edo to accuse his own master. You'll hear how the case reached the shogun himself in early 1633. Walk to the back of the grounds, where a cave shrine called Iwato-gu is said to have opened in a thunderstorm decades earlier.