Hōki-ji

This guide to Hoki-ji in Nara opens with a dying wish: Prince Shotoku, Japan's great early patron of Buddhism, asked his son Yamashiro no Oe to turn a palace in Ikaruga into a temple, work that became this pagoda, the oldest three-story pagoda standing in Japan. It follows the son who kept that promise through decades of construction, and shifts to 643, when the Soga clan tightened its grip on the imperial court and Soga no Iruka came to see Shotoku's heir as a threat to the succession he wanted for someone else. Iruka sent soldiers, led by a commander named Kose no Tokuta, toward the prince's residence a short walk from where you stand.