Audio guide
An ancient Indian silhouette in modern Tokyo: four hundred years of fire, rebuilding and reinvention
Quick answer
This Mappu audio guide for 築地本願寺 (Tsukiji Hongwanji) highlights Welcome to Tsukiji Hongwanji, A Temple That Kept Rebuilding Itself, and Ito Chuta and a Hall That Looks Down the Silk Road, giving travelers a concise overview before exploring Tokyo.
Welcome to Tsukiji Hongwanji, in the Tsukiji district of Chuo City, Tokyo. Take a good long look at the building in front of you, because it is probably not what your mind pictured when you heard the word temple. There is no dark timber, no gently curving tiled roof. Instead, you are looking at a stone colored hall with an ancient Indian and Asian Buddhist silhouette, sitting low and solid at the edge of one of Tokyo's most famous market districts. This is a temple of the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha school, and it is a directly supervised temple of Nishi Hongwanji in Kyoto, the head temple of that school. Its story in this city reaches back to the early seventeenth century, and yet the hall you see standing now was raised in the twentieth century, in reinforced concrete, because disaster reshaped this neighborhood. Over the next few minutes we will move through four hundred years of that story. A fire that erased a wooden hall. An earthquake that erased almost everything else. An architect who loved animals and ancient Asia. And a congregation that today is asking what a temple can be in a digital age. Along the way, keep your eyes open. There are animals hiding in this building.
Let us start at the beginning. By the temple's own account, it marked four hundred years since its founding in 2017, which places its origins in the early seventeenth century, when it served as a base for spreading Jodo Shinshu teaching in Edo. That first hall did not stand here. It stood in Asakusa Yokoyama-cho, in the area of today's Higashi Nihonbashi, and Edo residents knew it fondly as Asakusa Mido, the Asakusa hall. Then came catastrophe. In 1657 the great Meireki fire, remembered also as the furisode fire, burned the wooden hall to the ground. As the city was reorganized afterward, the shogunate offered the temple a replacement plot described as one hundred ken square, roughly ten thousand tsubo of land. The temple's home today is here in Tsukiji. The next great rupture arrived in 1923, with the Great Kanto Earthquake. Fires that broke out immediately after the shaking destroyed the greater part of the temple complex, and the response shaped everything you now see. The temple rebuilt in 1934 with a deliberate emphasis on earthquake resistance and fire resistance. Even the dead were moved. Graves were transferred from the Tsukiji grounds to a large cemetery site in Suginami Ward, where, among many others, the writer Higuchi Ichiyo and the composer Koga Masao are buried.
Now meet the man behind this building. Ito Chuta, professor emeritus at Tokyo Imperial University and an architectural historian, designed the current main hall, completed in 1934, and gave it an exterior modeled on the ancient Buddhist architecture of India and Asia. The temple describes the effect this way. The Indian inspired outline, the stained glass over the entrance, the many animal carvings, together they create an Oriental atmosphere that seems to gesture back along the Silk Road, toward the roots of Buddhism's long journey into East Asia. And yet the details are a blend. Look closely and you will find Indian, Japanese, Western and Chinese architectural elements folded into one another. The temple offers one explanation for how such an unusual design was possible at all. The head of the school at the time, Otani Kozui, had a deep interest in overseas cultures and was the kind of figure who dispatched expeditions abroad. Structurally, this is a modern building in disguise. It is reinforced concrete, two floors above ground and one below, wearing a stone like exterior. The plan itself turned as well. The new hall faces west and sits toward the eastern side of the grounds, breaking with the older arrangement in which the main hall faced south through the Edo period. The hall that preceded it, rebuilt in 1901, had followed that older orientation. In 2014 the main hall, together with the Oya stone wall and the pillars of the gate, was designated a National Important Cultural Property.
Step inside, and the surprise reverses. The exterior speaks of ancient Asia, but the interior follows the traditional form of a Jodo Shinshu hall. The space for worshippers is larger than the space reserved for the priests' rituals, and the main image, Amida Nyorai, is enshrined at the center front. That image is a standing figure, traditionally said to have been carved by Prince Shotoku himself. The temple explains the standing posture as a gesture of arrival. It represents the Buddha coming to save each person right now, in this moment. And the practice here is simple. You say the nembutsu, namu amida butsu. Then let your eyes wander across the fittings. The floor is mosaic tile. Above you hangs a chandelier. Over the entrance doors is stained glass. On either side of those doors, large pipe organs stand like sentinels, and together they hold about two thousand pipes. The largest pipe is roughly three meters long, the smallest under one centimeter. Back outside, there are animals. Thirteen kinds of them are scattered across the temple grounds, beginning with a winged lion at the front of the main hall. There are cows, lions, horses, elephants, peacocks, monkeys and a range of mythical beasts. They were placed here by Ito Chuta, who was known to be fond of animals. Why each one stands exactly where it does, the temple says, is still a mystery.
Before you leave, notice how alive this place is. Tsukiji Hongwanji has been describing itself as a smart temple, and it means it. Since 2019 it has given its priests computers and smartphones, and shifted its paperwork from stamped seals toward electronic approval. Meetings happen by video conference, and the main hall is streamed live, so services can be followed online as well as in person. There is an official app, a members' program, and a network that connects the temple with its five branch temples. The organ has even been used to play a rock ballad, Forever Love by X Japan, with the performance shared online. And there is a cafe on the grounds, known for an eighteen item breakfast, sweets, an original blend of tea and small dishes sourced from Tsukiji outer market shops, along with a commemorative card for visitors who stop to worship. So here is your invitation. Walk the grounds slowly and go looking for those thirteen kinds of animals. Start with the winged lion at the front of the main hall, then follow your curiosity. Ask yourself why an architect who studied the whole sweep of Asian architecture would set a cow beside a staircase, or an elephant against a wall. Nobody has recorded the answer. That means the noticing, at least, is entirely yours.
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It covers A Temple That Kept Rebuilding Itself, Ito Chuta and a Hall That Looks Down the Silk Road, and The Interior, the Animals, and the Standing Amida, with practical context and details to notice during the visit.
Let us start at the beginning. By the temple's own account, it marked four hundred years since its founding in 2017, which places its origins in the early seventeenth century, when it served as a base for spreading Jodo Shinshu teaching in Edo. That first hall did not stand here. It stood in Asakusa Yokoyama-cho, in the area of today's Higashi Nihonbashi, and Edo residents knew it fondly as Asakusa Mido, the Asakusa hall.
You can continue with follow-up questions such as "This temple's first hall stood in Asakusa Yokoyama-cho and was known as Asakusa Mido. What happened to it in 1657, and what did the shogunate offer the temple afterward?", then keep the guide connected to your map and trip plan.
