Zojo-ji
Buddhist temple complex with a surviving sixteen-twenties gate and a Tokugawa shogun mausoleum.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Zojo-ji in Tokyo starts among nearly 1,300 small stone Jizo statues, capped and be-ribboned by grieving parents, before reaching back to the temple's founding in 1393 and its adoption two centuries later by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who made it his family's own. You'll hear how his descendants filled the grounds with lacquered shogun mausoleums, and what happened to almost all of it in a single night of firebombing in 1945. It ends by asking you to stand under the one gate old enough to have seen both eras and look up.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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