Ueno Toshogu Shrine

This guide to Ueno Toshogu Shrine in Tokyo opens with an incendiary bomb that fell here one night in 1945 and never went off, and traces the shrine's long run of near misses back through the 1923 earthquake and the street battles of 1868. It follows the Golden Hall's construction in 1651 for Tokugawa Iemitsu, wrapped in roughly a hundred thousand sheets of gold leaf, and the carved dragons on its gate, said to slip free after dark to drink from Shinobazu Pond. Look up at the gate as you listen for the two dragons twisting around its pillars.