Kōsokuji: The Temple Named After Its Jailer

There is no ticket window. Admission is 100 yen, dropped into a red box beside the path.

Beyond it is the main hall. Its frame dates from 1650, which makes it nearly four centuries younger than the temple.

In front of the hall, a long stone carries Ame ni mo makezu, “Unbeaten by rain, unbeaten by wind,” by Miyazawa Kenji, one of Japan’s best-loved writers. Kenji was a devout follower of the Lotus Sutra. In the notebook where he wrote the poem, it is followed by Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, the invocation Nichiren taught, and the names of buddhas and bodhisattvas. The stone carries those too.

Kenji is not known to have come here. The stone is here for his faith, not his footsteps.

The first steps were easy to find. Then they gave out, and I followed whatever looked vaguely like a path, up a slope covered in plants. Somewhere along the way it forked.

The post had been quite sure of the direction. Nothing after it was.

It is a genuinely risky climb, and not one to make in a hurry or in the wrong shoes.

At the top, the cell turned out to be an opening in the hillside, under the roots of a tree. Someone had tied a rope around the trunk beside it.

Ōhashi Tarō, the story goes, was a warrior from Kyushu who fell under suspicion of rebellion against Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shogun, and spent twelve years in a cell in Kamakura. His son grew up without him. When the boy came to the city looking for his father, he read the Lotus Sutra through the night at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, its great shrine. People gathered to listen, word reached Yoritomo, and the father was set free.

Nichiren told this story himself, in a letter written in 1276. He puts the cell at Yui-no-hama, on the shore, rather than on this hillside.

In Yukuhashi, in Fukuoka Prefecture, the story keeps going. Ōhashi Tarō and his family reach Kyushu and settle on a stretch of coast where a few fishermen take them in. People from his old lands follow, and the place comes to be called Ōhashi.

A metal sign by the cell estimates its history at more than seven hundred years.

Through the lattice, the floor is bare earth and loose rock. I could not imagine anyone living in there. How Nichirō was actually held is not certain: whether in this cell, under house arrest, or with more freedom than either.

The estate is said to have belonged to Yadoya Mitsunori, and the Yadoya family had crossed paths with Nichiren before. In 1260, Nichiren wrote Risshō Ankoku Ron, a treatise on how the country might put an end to the disasters striking it, and submitted it to Hōjō Tokiyori, the former regent and then still the most powerful man in the shogunate. It went to him through a member of the family.

In 1271, the shogunate arrested Nichiren. Less than a month before the letter, he came close to being executed at Tatsunokuchi. His disciples were rounded up, and Nichirō and others, it is said, were handed over to Mitsunori, who kept them in the cell on his estate.

Nichiren’s letter does not stay on the cold. Near the end, it gives an instruction: if you are let out of the cell, come quickly.