Hosen-in

This guide to Hosen-in in Kyoto opens beneath a ceiling of blood-stained boards, and turns on 1600, when the samurai commander Torii Mototada held Fushimi Castle for eleven days against a far larger army, buying time for his lord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, before a battle that would decide Japan's future. It follows how Kyoto's temples later took in boards from that castle's floor and set them into their ceilings as a kind of prayer. Listen for the water dripping into a buried clay pot outside, its chime carried up through a bamboo pipe.