Nikkō Tōshō-gū

Nikkō Tōshō-gū is the opposite of the restraint usually associated with Japanese shrines. It is the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who unified Japan and founded the shogunate that ruled it for two and a half centuries, and it was made to dazzle: lacquer, gold leaf, brilliant paint and carving on almost every surface, set among giant cedars on a wooded hillside above the town of Nikkō. A first shrine was built in 1617, the year after Ieyasu's death; his grandson Iemitsu, the third shogun, rebuilt and enlarged it in the great reconstruction of 1636, summoning the finest craftsmen and painters in the country, and most of what stands today is their work.

The climax is the Yōmeimon, a gate about eleven metres high covered with some five hundred carvings of dragons, phoenixes, imaginary beasts and sages from Chinese tradition. Its nickname means roughly "the gate of the setting sun": a visitor could stand looking at it all day without noticing the evening come. Beyond it the white Karamon gate leads towards the main sanctuary, built in the gongen-zukuri style that joins worship hall and inner hall under a single complex roof. The famous details are small and easy to miss. On the sacred stable is the carving of the three monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil; above a passage to the inner precinct sleeps the Nemuri-neko, a carved cat attributed to the legendary sculptor Hidari Jingorō; and in the Honjidō hall a dragon painted on the ceiling seems to cry out when two blocks of wood are clapped beneath its head.

From the sleeping cat, a flight of hundreds of stone steps climbs through the cedar forest to the Okumiya, Ieyasu's tomb, quiet and shaded after the splendour below. Near the entrance stands a slender five-storey pagoda, first donated in 1650 and rebuilt in 1818 after a fire, whose levels stand for earth, water, fire, wind and the void. Forty-two structures of the shrine are part of the World Heritage site of the Shrines and Temples of Nikkō, and five of them are National Treasures of Japan.

Getting there

The shrine stands on the edge of the town of Nikkō in Tochigi Prefecture, about 2 km from the stations. From Tokyo, Tobu limited express trains run from Asakusa to Tobu-Nikkō Station in about 1 hour 50 minutes; from the station the shrine is reached on foot or by local bus. The nearest airport by distance is Fukushima (FKS), about 90 km away, but most visitors arrive through Tokyo's airports.