Adashino Nenbutsuji Temple

This guide to Adashino Nenbutsuji Temple in Kyoto traces the history of a Kyoto hillside once used as an open-air resting place for the city's unclaimed poor, and the small stone Buddhas neighbors carved for the forgotten dead over the centuries. It follows the early 1900s effort to gather the scattered statues onto this ground, arranged shoulder to shoulder in the rows you see today. Listen for how the temple still marks their memory once a year, on two nights in late August.