Benzaiten Hall

This guide to Benzaiten Hall in Okinawa starts with a fireproof library built in the early fifteen hundreds on a stone island reached by a lotus-carved bridge, raised to protect Buddhist sutra scrolls a Korean king had once sent to the Ryukyu court. It follows the 1609 invasion by Satsuma samurai that wrecked the hall and scattered those scrolls, and the choice the islanders made a decade later when they rebuilt it. The hall stands reachable only by the arched bridge called Tennyo-bashi, the bridge of the heavenly maiden.