The temple's lineage stretches back to 1617, when the 12th monshu Junnyo Shonin ordered the construction of Edo-Asakusa Gobo, a Jodo Shinshu temple in Tokyo's Asakusa district. It stood for exactly 40 years before the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657 burned it to the ground along with two-thirds of Edo. The shogunate refused to let the temple rebuild in Asakusa, citing a competing project on the site. Instead, the Jodo Shinshu community was directed to newly reclaimed marshland along the Sumida River -- land that devotees from nearby Tsukudajima had helped fill in themselves. The relocated temple, called Tsukiji Gobo, took its name from the district: tsukiji, meaning 'constructed land.' It served as the Kanto regional headquarters of the Jodo Shinshu sect for over 250 years, until the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 leveled it completely.

The man tasked with designing the replacement was Ito Chuta, a University of Tokyo professor and one of Japan's most celebrated architects. Ito had spent years traveling across Asia, sketching Buddhist architecture in India, China, and Turkey, tracing the religion's visual language back toward its origins. For Tsukiji Hongan-ji, built between 1931 and 1934, he created a deliberate fusion: the central worship hall's barrel-vaulted roof echoes the rock-cut Buddhist caves at Ajanta in India, while stupas crown the flanking towers. But the building is not a replica of anything. Ito layered in Western elements -- stained glass windows, a marble interior, a full pipe organ -- alongside Japanese construction techniques, all rendered in earthquake-resistant reinforced concrete. The result is a building that belongs to no single tradition, a physical argument that Buddhism's architectural heritage spans continents.

Tsukiji Hongan-ji remains an active Jodo Shinshu temple and pilgrimage site. Devotees come to venerate artifacts associated with Prince Shotoku, the sixth-century regent who championed Buddhism's spread in Japan, and Shinran Shonin, the thirteenth-century monk who founded the Jodo Shinshu school. Enshrined to the left of the main altar is Shonyo Shonin, the 23rd monshu, who was born in 1911, served as Chief Abbot from 1927 to 1977, and dedicated his tenure to spreading Jodo Shinshu teachings internationally before his death in 2002. But the temple also holds a more unexpected memorial. In 1998, the funerary ceremony for Hideto Matsumoto -- the rock guitarist known to millions as hide, former lead guitarist of the band X Japan -- drew tens of thousands of mourning fans to Tsukiji Hongan-ji. A permanent memorial to him now sits inside the main hall, an unlikely fixture in a 400-year-old Buddhist institution that somehow fits perfectly in a building designed to defy expectations.