Nikko Toshogu

Twelve pillars hold up the Yomeimon, the most heavily worked gate at Nikko. Eleven of them carry the same interlocking geometric pattern, running the same way. The twelfth has it upside down.

It is not a slip. The reason given is that a thing which has been completed can only start to decay, so a builder leaves one flaw in it on purpose and the work stays unfinished, and therefore safe. The gate has a nickname that makes the same point from the other side: people call it the sunset gate, because you can stand in front of it and study the carvings until the light goes. Somewhere in all that gilding and lacquer, one pillar is quietly wrong.

A Dead Man Moved North

The shrine exists because Tokugawa Ieyasu, who ended a century of civil war and founded the dynasty that ruled Japan for the next 250 years, left instructions for his own afterlife. He died in 1616 and was buried near the coast. A year later, exactly as he had specified, his remains were carried north into the mountains at Nikko, and he was installed there not as an ancestor but as a deity.

The location was a political calculation. Nikko sits due north of Edo, the city his government ruled from. North is the direction of the fixed point that the night sky turns around. Placing the dead shogun there made him the still point above his own dynasty, which is a considerable thing to claim about a man whose grandchildren were still running the country.

The Grandson Overdoes It

Ieyasu's first shrine was modest. The one you can visit is the work of his grandson Iemitsu, who in the mid-1630s demolished it and rebuilt the whole complex on a scale nobody had attempted. The construction ran for about a year and a half and pulled in tens of thousands of carpenters, carvers, lacquerers and gilders from across the country.

The result runs directly against the usual reputation of Japanese architecture. Nothing is restrained. Surveys count more than five thousand carved figures across the buildings: dragons, lions, cranes, Chinese sages, and a pair of elephants clearly carved by someone working from a verbal description rather than an elephant.

The extravagance had a function. Much of the cost was pushed onto provincial lords, and who gave what was recorded. The shrine is a monument and an accounts ledger at once, and the stone and bronze lanterns crowding the approach are the receipts.

The Famous Monkeys Are Not What You Think

On the sacred stable, one of the few plain unpainted buildings on the site, is a carving of three monkeys covering their eyes, ears and mouth. It has travelled further than anything else at Nikko, and it is almost always shown alone.

In place it is the third panel of eight. The series follows a monkey from infancy to parenthood, and the covered eyes and ears belong to the childhood stage, before the animal goes out into the world. The image everyone uses as an emoji is a single frame lifted out of the middle of a story.

The Lord Who Gave Trees

Every lord was expected to donate something to the shrine: a lantern, a bronze vessel, a gate, a bell. A man named Matsudaira Masatsuna could not afford any of it. What he did instead was plant trees, along the roads leading to Nikko, for roughly two decades, finishing not long before his death.

The bronze lanterns are still there, and nobody can tell you whose is whose. Masatsuna's gift turned into a corridor of cedars kilometers long, still standing in the tens of thousands, and you can drive part of it today.

What It Survived

When the Tokugawa order collapsed in 1868, shogunate loyalists fell back on Nikko and considered making a stand inside the complex. Negotiations with the opposing commander kept the fighting off the mountain and the buildings came through untouched. In the same period the new government ordered the separation of Shinto and Buddhist institutions, and Nikko, which had operated as a single religious body for centuries, was split into three. It has stayed split.

Now

The shrines and temples of Nikko went onto the World Heritage list in 1999, covering more than a hundred protected structures. The Yomeimon reopened in 2017 after a four-year restoration that stripped and rebuilt the lacquer layer by layer and researched the original pigments under later repainting.

The permanent problem is the material. Lacquer, gold leaf and painted wood are in a losing argument with snow, damp and freeze-thaw at this altitude, so conservation here is not a project but a standing regime. Four centuries into that regime, the gate, upside-down pillar included, is still not finished.