Isshin-ji Temple

This guide to Isshin-ji Temple in Osaka traces its founding in 1185 by the monk Honen and its later patronage by Tokugawa Ieyasu after the Siege of Osaka, before turning to an odd problem the temple faced by the 1880s: thousands of families' worth of cremated ashes and nowhere left to keep them. It follows the head priest's unusual solution in 1887 and what happened to the results when American bombs leveled the district during the Second World War. Families kept returning anyway, urns in hand, every April.