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:  Iyeyasu himself, in the mountains of Nikko, has no quieter resting-place than his descendants in the heart of the city over which they ruled.

Besides the graves of the Shoguns, Zojoji contains other lesser shrines, in which are buried the wives of the second, sixth, and eleventh Shoguns, and the father of Iyenobu, 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 Iyeyasu, 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 Zojoji; 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 Honen, the founder of the Jodo 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 Uyeno is the second of the burial-grounds of the Shoguns.  The Temple To-yei-zan, which stood in the grounds of Uyeno, was built by Iyemitsu, the third of the Shoguns of the house of Tokugawa, in the year 1625, in honour of Yakushi Niorai, the Buddhist AEsculapius.  It faces the Ki-mon, or Devil’s Gate, of the castle, and was erected upon the model of the temple of Hi-yei-zan, one of the most famous of the holy places of Kiyoto.  Having founded the temple, the next care of Iyemitsu was to pray that Morizumi, the second son of the retired emperor, should come and reside there; and from that time until 1868, the temple was always presided over by a Miya, or member of the Mikado’s family, who was specially charged with the care of the tomb of Iyeyasu at Nikko, and whose position was that of an ecclesiastical chief or primate over the east of Japan.