The monk Gyoki founded the original temple around 740 as a small Shingon Buddhist chapel tucked within the precincts of a Shinto shrine called Morooka Hiko Jinja on the Noto Peninsula, a remote finger of land jutting into the Sea of Japan from Honshu. For more than five hundred years it remained modest and local. By 1296 the temple had grown just enough to support a single full-time priest, a master ajari named Joken. Then the shrine relocated in 1321, and Joken entrusted the old temple to a Zen master named Keizan -- later honored as Soto Zen's great patriarch, Taiso Josai Daishi. Keizan transformed the chapel into something entirely new: a headquarters for Soto Zen. The first official abbot, Gasan, was installed months later. For a time, the old Shingon rituals continued alongside the new Zen practice, and the original deity, Kannon Bodhisattva, remained enshrined. The transition was not a rupture but a layering, old devotions folded beneath new discipline.

What made Soji-ji powerful was not its theology but its logistics. The temple sent monks outward into the Japanese countryside, generation after generation. These itinerant monks would find small village chapels -- nominally affiliated with the Tendai or Shingon schools -- and convert them into full-time Soto Zen temples. Each conversion added another node to Soji-ji's growing network. Over the centuries, this grassroots strategy built a web of affiliated temples that made Soji-ji one of only two head temples in the entire Soto school, sharing that distinction with Eihei-ji in Fukui Prefecture. The original Noto site, now called Sojiji-soin, remained active as a training monastery until the 2007 Noto earthquake caused considerable damage. But by then the headquarters had long since moved. In 1911, the main operations transferred to Tsurumi in Yokohama, where the temple now occupies a sprawling urban campus of about twelve buildings.

The Tsurumi campus is organized around the traditional Shichido garan -- seven core structures that define a proper Zen monastery. The sanmon gate, completed in 1969, claims to be the largest such gate in Japan. Behind it, the architect Ito Chuta designed the Daiso-do, the main hall honoring Keizan and other founders, as well as the Senbutsujo, where monks train and ordain. The Butsuden enshrines a statue of Gautama Buddha. The Shokuro houses the instruments that govern the monks' days -- the great bell, the drum, the cloud gong, and the moppan. In 1990, the Sanshokaku was built as a visitors' center equipped with computers and modern amenities, fulfilling Keizan's ancient vow to help all sentient beings by offering workshops and practice sessions for lay visitors. The Hoko-do handles memorial rites for the ancestors of lay families, while the Koshakudai contains the monks' living quarters -- spare rooms for spare lives, ordered by the same rhythms that have governed Zen monastic life for seven hundred years.

Soji-ji is also a place of burial. Former Prime Minister Kiyoura Keigo rests here. So does Asano Soichiro, the industrialist whose business empire helped shape modern Yokohama. The professional wrestler Antonio Inoki, beloved across Japan, was laid to rest at Soji-ji as well. The journalist and novelist Kuroiwa Shuroku, the composer Toshiro Mayuzumi, and the singer Toshiko Sekiya are all interred on the grounds. A memorial to the victims of the 1951 Sakuragicho train fire -- a disaster that killed 106 people at a nearby station -- also stands within the temple precincts. These burials tie Soji-ji to Yokohama's modern history as tightly as its monastic practices tie it to medieval Zen. The temple is not a museum. It is a working monastery where two hundred residents still rise before dawn, still sit zazen for two hours, still eat rice gruel and pickles, and still sweep the corridors clean before the city outside their walls has finished its first cup of coffee.