Of the many fair scenes of Yedo, none is better worth visiting than
the temple of Zôjôji, one of the two great burial-places of the
Shoguns; indeed, if you wish to see the most beautiful spots of any
Oriental city, ask for the cemeteries: the homes of the dead are ever
the loveliest places. Standing in a park of glorious firs and pines
beautifully kept, which contains quite a little town of neat,
clean-looking houses, together with thirty-four temples for the use of
the priests and attendants of the shrines, the main temple, with its
huge red pillars supporting a heavy Chinese roof of grey tiles, is
approached through a colossal open hall which leads into a stone
courtyard. At one end of this courtyard is a broad flight of
steps--the three or four lower ones of stone, and the upper ones of
red wood. At these the visitor is warned by a notice to take off his
boots, a request which Englishmen, with characteristic disregard of
the feelings of others, usually neglect to comply with. The main hall
of the temple is of large proportions, and the high altar is decorated
with fine bronze candelabra, incense-burners, and other ornaments, and
on two days of the year a very curious collection of pictures
representing the five hundred gods, whose images are known to all
persons who have visited Canton, is hung along the walls. The big bell
outside the main hall is rather remarkable on account of the great
beauty of the deep bass waves of sound which it rolls through the city
than on account of its size, which is as nothing when compared with
that of the big bells of Moscow and Peking; still it is not to be
despised even in that respect, for it is ten feet high and five feet
eight inches in diameter, while its metal is a foot thick: it was hung
up in the year 1673. But the chief objects of interest in these
beautiful grounds are the chapels attached to the tombs of the
Shoguns.
It is said that as Prince Iyéyasu was riding into Yedo to take
possession of his new castle, the Abbot of Zôjôji, an ancient temple
which then stood at Hibiya, near the castle, went forth and waited
before the gate to do homage to the Prince. Iyéyasu, seeing that the
Abbot was no ordinary man, stopped and asked his name, and entered the
temple to rest himself. The smooth-spoken monk soon found such favour
with Iyéyasu, that he chose Zôjôji to be his family temple; and seeing
that its grounds were narrow and inconveniently near the castle, he
caused it to be removed to its present site. In the year 1610 the
temple was raised, by the intercession of Iyéyasu, to the dignity of
the Imperial Temples, which, until the last revolution, were presided
over by princes of the blood; and to the Abbot was granted the right,
on going to the castle, of sitting in his litter as far as the
entrance-hall, instead of dismounting at the usual place and
proceeding on foot through several gates and courtyards. Nor were the
privileges of the temple confined to barren honours, for it was
endowed with lands of the value of five thousand kokus of rice yearly.
When Iyéyasu died, the shrine called Antoku In was erected in his
honour to the south of the main temple. Here, on the seventeenth day
of the fourth month, the anniversary of his death, ceremonies are held
in honour of his spirit, deified as Gongen Sama, and the place is
thrown open to all who may wish to come and pray. But Iyéyasu is not
buried here; his remains lie in a gorgeous shrine among the mountains
some eighty miles north of Yedo, at Nikkô, a place so beautiful that
the Japanese have a rhyming proverb which says, that he who has not
seen Nikkô should never pronounce the word Kekkô (charming, delicious,
grand, beautiful).
Hidétada, the son and successor of Iyéyasu, together with Iyénobu,
Iyétsugu, Iyéshigé, Iyéyoshi, and Iyémochi, the sixth, seventh, ninth,
twelfth, and fourteenth Shoguns of the Tokugawa dynasty, are buried in
three shrines attached to the temple; the remainder, with the
exception of Iyémitsu, the third Shogun, who lies with his grandfather
at Nikkô, are buried at Uyéno.
The shrines are of exceeding beauty, lying on one side of a splendid
avenue of Scotch firs, which border a broad, well-kept gravel walk.
Passing through a small gateway of rare design, we come into a large
stone courtyard, lined with a long array of colossal stone lanterns,
the gift of the vassals of the departed Prince. A second gateway,
supported by gilt pillars carved all round with figures of dragons,
leads into another court, in which are a bell tower, a great cistern
cut out of a single block of stone like a sarcophagus, and a smaller
number of lanterns of bronze; these are given by the Go San Ké, the
three princely families in which the succession to the office of
Shogun was vested. Inside this is a third court, partly covered like a
cloister, the approach to which is a doorway of even greater beauty
and richness than the last; the ceiling is gilt, and painted with
arabesques and with heavenly angels playing on musical instruments,
and the panels of the walls are sculptured in high relief with
admirable representations of birds and flowers, life-size, life-like,
all being coloured to imitate nature. Inside this enclosure stands a
shrine, before the closed door of which a priest on one side, and a
retainer of the house of Tokugawa on the other, sit mounting guard,
mute and immovable as though they themselves were part of the carved
ornaments. Passing on one side of the shrine, we come to another
court, plainer than the last, and at the back of the little temple
inside it is a flight of stone steps, at the top of which, protected
by a bronze door, stands a simple monumental urn of bronze on a stone
pedestal. Under this is the grave itself; and it has always struck me
that there is no small amount of poetical feeling in this simple
ending to so much magnificence; the sermon may have been preached by
design, or it may have been by accident, but the lesson is there.
There is little difference between the three shrines, all of which are
decorated in the same manner. It is very difficult to do justice to
their beauty in words. Writing many thousand miles away from them, I
have the memory before me of a place green in winter, pleasant and
cool in the hottest summer; of peaceful cloisters, of the fragrance of
incense, of the subdued chant of richly robed priests, and the music
of bells; of exquisite designs, harmonious colouring, rich gilding.
The hum of the vast city outside is unheard here: Iyéyasu himself, in
the mountains of Nikkô, has no quieter resting-place than his
descendants in the heart of the city over which they ruled.
Besides the graves of the Shoguns, Zôjôji contains other lesser
shrines, in which are buried the wives of the second, sixth, and
eleventh Shoguns, and the father of Iyénobu, the sixth Shogun, who
succeeded to the office by adoption. There is also a holy place
called the Satsuma Temple, which has a special interest; in it is a
tablet in honour of Tadayoshi, the fifth son of Iyéyasu, whose title
was Matsudaira Satsuma no Kami, and who died young. At his death, five
of his retainers, with one Ogasasawara Kemmotsu at their head,
disembowelled themselves, that they might follow their young master
into the next world. They were buried in this place; and I believe
that this is the last instance on record of the ancient Japanese
custom of _Junshi_, that is to say, "dying with the master."
There are, during the year, several great festivals which are
specially celebrated at Zôjoji; the chief of these are the Kaisanki,
or founder's day, which is on the eighteenth day of the seventh month;
the twenty-fifth day of the first month, the anniversary of the death
of the monk Hônen, the founder of the Jôdo sect of Buddhism (that to
which the temple belongs); the anniversary of the death of Buddha, on
the fifteenth of the second month; the birthday of Buddha, on the
eighth day of the fourth month; and from the sixth to the fifteenth of
the tenth month.
At Uyéno is the second of the burial-grounds of the Shoguns. The
Temple Tô-yei-zan, which stood in the grounds of Uyéno, was built by
Iyémitsu, the third of the Shoguns of the house of Tokugawa, in the
year 1625, in honour of Yakushi Niôrai, the Buddhist Æsculapius. It
faces the Ki-mon, or Devil's Gate, of the castle, and was erected upon
the model of the temple of Hi-yei-zan, one of the most famous of the
holy places of Kiyôto. Having founded the temple, the next care of
Iyémitsu was to pray that Morizumi, the second son of the retired
emperor, should come and reside there; and from that time until 1868,
the temple was always presided over by a Miya, or member of the
Mikado's family, who was specially charged with the care of the tomb
of Iyéyasu at Nikkô, and whose position was that of an ecclesiastical
chief or primate over the east of Japan.
The temples in Yedo are not to be compared in point of beauty with
those in and about Peking; what is marble there is wood here. Still
they are very handsome, and in the days of its magnificence the Temple
of Uyéno was one of the finest. Alas! the main temple, the hall in
honour of the sect to which it belongs, the hall of services, the
bell-tower, the entrance-hall, and the residence of the prince of the
blood, were all burnt down in the battle of Uyéno, in the summer of
1868, when the Shogun's men made their last stand in Yedo against the
troops of the Mikado. The fate of the day was decided by two
field-pieces, which the latter contrived to mount on the roof of a
neighbouring tea-house; and the Shogun's men, driven out of the place,
carried off the Miya in the vain hope of raising his standard in the
north as that of a rival Mikado. A few of the lesser temples and
tombs, and the beautiful park-like grounds, are but the remnants of
the former glory of Uyéno. Among these is a temple in the form of a
roofless stage, in honour of the thousand-handed Kwannon. In the
middle ages, during the civil wars between the houses of Gen and Hei,
one Morihisa, a captain of the house of Hei, after the destruction of
his clan, went and prayed for a thousand days at the temple of the
thousand-handed Kwannon at Kiyomidzu, in Kiyôto. His retreat having
been discovered, he was seized and brought bound to Kamakura, the
chief town of the house of Gen. Here he was condemned to die at a
place called Yui, by the sea-shore; but every time that the
executioner lifted his sword to strike, the blade was broken by the
god Kwannon, and at the same time the wife of Yoritomo, the chief of
the house of Gen, was warned in a dream to spare Morihisa's life. So
Morihisa was reprieved, and rose to power in the state; and all this
was by the miraculous intervention of the god Kwannon, who takes such
good care of his faithful votaries. To him this temple is dedicated. A
colossal bronze Buddha, twenty-two feet high, set up some two hundred
years ago, and a stone lantern, twenty feet high, and twelve feet
round at the top, are greatly admired by the Japanese. There are only
three such lanterns in the empire; the other two being at Nanzenji--a
temple in Kiyôto, and Atsura, a shrine in the province of Owari. All
three were erected by the piety of one man, Sakuma Daizen no Suké, in
the year A.D. 1631.
Iyémitsu, the founder of the temple, was buried with his grandfather,
Iyéyasu, at Nikkô; but both of these princes are honoured with shrines
here. The Shoguns who are interred at Uyéno are Iyétsuna, Tsunayoshi,
Yoshimuné, Iyéharu, Iyénori, and Iyésada, the fourth, fifth, eighth,
tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth Princes of the Line. Besides them, are
buried five wives of the Shoguns, and the father of the eleventh
Shogun.