Tales of Old Japan - Maybe You Like It

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
192