The temple's roots reach back to the ninth century, when Shūei, a disciple of the great monk Kūkai, founded a temple called Komyo-ji in the Kaizuka district of what is now Chiyoda. For nearly five hundred years it followed the Shingon school. Then, in 1393 during the Muromachi period, the abbot Yūyo Shōsō converted the temple to the Jōdo -- Pure Land -- school of Buddhism, and Zojoji was effectively reborn. When Tokugawa Ieyasu consolidated power and began expanding Edo Castle in 1590, he personally directed the temple's relocation, first to Hibiya, then to its present site in the Shiba neighborhood. Alongside Kan'ei-ji in the north, Zojoji became one of two official Tokugawa family temples. Six shoguns would eventually be interred here, their mausoleums rivaling the grandeur of Nikko. The Taitoku-in Mausoleum honoring the second shogun Hidetada and his wife was designated a National Treasure of Japan -- before fire consumed it.

At its peak, Zojoji's grounds held more than 120 structures -- halls, pagodas, sub-temples, and elaborate mausoleums that drew comparison to the most lavish religious complexes in Japan. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 began the decline, as state-sponsored Shinto pushed Buddhism to the margins and temple lands were confiscated. Then came March 1945 and the Bombing of Tokyo. Incendiary raids destroyed most of what remained. The mausoleum of Hidetada, once a National Treasure, burned. The great halls burned. The pagodas burned. Only the Sangedatsumon survived -- three stories of dark timber and heavy tile roofing, its name meaning 'Gate of Three Liberations.' It stands today as an Important Cultural Property, a lone original survivor in a complex that has been largely rebuilt. The current Daiden, or great hall, dates to 1974. Beneath it, a Treasure Gallery opened in 2015 houses Kano Kazunobu paintings and a scale model of the lost mausoleum -- a ghost of what fire took.

Behind the great hall, tucked into a garden that most visitors discover almost by accident, hundreds of small stone statues stand in rows. These are the Sentai Kosodate Jizō -- statues representing unborn children lost to miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. Parents choose a statue and dress it in small knitted caps and bibs, leaving pinwheels that spin in the breeze and toys for a child who never held them. Small offerings are placed for Jizō, the bodhisattva who guards children in the afterlife. Visitors sometimes stack stones beside the figures, a practice meant to ease the passage between worlds. The garden is one of the most quietly affecting places in Tokyo -- a landscape of grief expressed through tenderness, where the bright colors of children's clothing stand against gray stone and green moss. There is no noise here, even though Tokyo Tower looms directly overhead.

Zojoji has drawn artists for centuries. Hiroshige included the temple twice in his celebrated One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series in the 1850s, depicting the pagoda against Akabane and the grounds alongside Shiba Shinmei Shrine. In the 1920s and 1930s, the shin-hanga artist Kawase Hasui returned to Zojoji repeatedly, captivated by the temple under snow. His 1922 woodblock print Snow at Zōjō Temple -- showing the Sangedatsumon gate frosted white against a blue-gray sky -- became one of the most recognizable images in modern Japanese printmaking. The temple that drew Hiroshige during the Edo period and Hasui during the Taisho and early Showa eras now draws millions of visitors and photographers each year, many of them framing the same composition: ancient timber gate in the foreground, the red and white lattice of Tokyo Tower rising behind it.

Zojoji is not a museum. It remains the main temple of the Jōdo-shū faith and the central seminary where Pure Land priests and novices train. The temple calendar runs through the entire year: Hatsumōde draws enormous New Year's crowds, the Setsubun ceremony marks the turning of seasons in February, and the Bon Odori festival fills summer evenings with traditional dance. On New Year's Eve, the Joya no Kane ceremony rings the temple bell 108 times -- once for each earthly desire in Buddhist teaching. The bell's sound carries across Shiba Park and through the streets of Minato, marking the boundary between one year and the next in a city that measures time in train schedules and quarterly earnings. For over six hundred years, through shoguns and firebombing and reconstruction, Zojoji has kept ringing.