Yoshiminedera Temple

This guide to Yoshiminedera Temple in Kyoto follows a Kyoto grocer's daughter, born in the 1620s, who left for the shogun's court in Edo and returned generations later as Keishoin, mother of a Tokugawa shogun, funding the temple's rebuilding after the Onin War left it in ruins. It also traces the temple's five-needle pine, trained sideways along the stairs for centuries until a court noble named it the playful dragon pine in 1857.