Kan'ei-ji

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Kan'ei-ji in the 19th century
pagoda

Kan'ei-ji ( Japanese 寛 永 寺 ) is a Buddhist temple of the Tendai direction on Ueno Hill in the Taitō -ku district in northern Tokyo .

Its building was built under Tokugawa Iemitsu by the priest Tenkai ( 天 海 ; 1536–1643) in 1625 or Kan'ei 2 according to the traditional Japanese calendar . The extensive facility was almost completely destroyed by artillery fire during the Boshin War . The former main area is now a park; the buildings of the Tokyo National Museum are now located on the abbot and monk 's area . The temple continues to exist behind it in a modest form.

history

Kan'ei-ji bell tower before 1868
The Kan'ei-ji around 1830 (detail)
Gate to the Ietsuna mausoleum
After the bombardment in 1868

The surname ( sangō ) of the temple is "Hiei of the East" ( 東 叡 山 , Tōei-zan ). This is an allusion to the Temple Mount Hiei-zan ( 比叡 山 ) northeast of Kyōto and indicates the comparable location in northeast Edo with a comparable symbolic protective function. As the illustration in the city guide Edo meisho zue (1829-1836) shows, it was an extensive temple complex with a front gate ( 文 珠 楼 , Bunshu-rō ), an unusual second gate system flanked by the ( 常 行 堂 , Jōgyō-dō ) on the left and the ( 法 華堂 , Hokke-dō ) on the right. Next to this building was the unusually large bell tower. After the intermediate gate one came to the large main hall surrounded by a colonnade, called here compos chūdō ( 根本 中堂 ). 36 sub-temples belonged to the temple. Since 1673 one was responsible for the control of the wandering Gannin-bōzu in the capital and the Kantō-level , in this function one was subordinate to the Kurama-dera of Kyoto.

As the second Tokugawa family temple next to the Zōjō-ji , it houses six of the Shogun graves on its site, each originally in an elaborate square surrounded by a wall. These tombs had partly survived the Boshin War, but since the Second World War only the remains of two structures have survived, those for Ietsuna and Tsunayoshi. They are important cultural monuments, as the corresponding systems are no longer available at the Zōjō-ji. Are buried in the Kan'ei-ji, listed with their posthumous names in brackets:

Shoguns' graves

Traditionally, a member of the imperial family stood at the top of the temple. At the time of the fall of the shogunate, this was Kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa-shinnō .

Today's Kan'ei-ji got his building by moving a small temple from Kawagoe. He and the tombs are behind the National Museum.

annotation

  1. ↑ Kitashirakawa took part in the Boshin War on the Tokugawa side and surrendered in the fall of Sendai. Pardoned, he went to Berlin in 1870, where he studied military affairs and was also a central figure among the Japanese. During the campaign against Taiwan, he fell ill with malaria and died there.

literature

  • Tōkyō-to rekishi kyōiku kenkyūkai (Ed.): Tōkyō-to no rekishi sampo, shitamachi . Yamakawa shuppansha, 2001, ISBN 4-634-29130-4 .
  • Konversationslexikon Kōjien
  • Kasumi kaikan (Ed.): Rokumeikan mitsuzō shashin-chō . Heibonsha, 1997. ISBN 4-582-23109-8 .

Coordinates: 35 ° 43 ′ 18.8 ″  N , 139 ° 46 ′ 28.9 ″  E