Kyoto a Cultural Guide. John H. Martin
the roof over the 58.5-foot-tall image of Buddha. In 1615, to mark the completion of the project, a huge bronze bell was cast and mounted in its own structure. It still stands, 14 feet tall and nine feet in diameter; it is 9 inches thick and weighs 82 tons. On it, Hideyori had inscribed the words Kokka Anko, "Security and Peace in the Nation."
Ieyasu, looking for a pretext to undermine Hideyori whom he found too handsome and too capable and thereby a political threat to his and his family's continued rule, had not only refused to contribute funds to the rebuilding of this popular memorial to Hideyoshi but also claimed that the second and fourth characters in the inscription on the bell could be read as "Ieyasu." the intent, he claimed, was to place a curse upon him.
In time, Ieyasu resorted to armed force, and in 1615 he besieged Hideyori in his castle in Osaka, a castle Hideyori had inherited from his father. The Toyotomi family was exterminated, and one of the justifications used by Ieyasu for this treacherous and brutal act was the supposed threat which had appeared on the great bell at the Hokoji. Afterwards, the head of Toyotomi Hideyori's seven-year-old son was displayed at the Sanjo (Third Street) Bridge in the same manner as were those of traitors and criminals. The Hokoji today is a rather nondescript complex. The 1609 Buddha and its hall, which were restored at the expense of Hideyori and his mother, were destroyed by an earthquake in 1662, and the replacements of these were lost in a fire in 1798. The new image of 1843, which replaced the previous Buddha, was destroyed in a 1973 fire. Thus, the existing halls of the temple are not very important since all that was of consequence has been consumed by the flames of the centuries.
What remains of the original Hokoji is the Great Bell of 1615 which stands in a belfry rebuilt in 1884. The offending characters of Kokka Anko were removed at Hideyori's order soon after the bell was completed because of Ieyasu's pretended offense at the curse he claimed to have read. Today, one can have the experience of pulling the cord that sends the wooden beam of the belfry crashing against the side of the bell—to sound the praise of Hideyoshi or to curse Ieyasu, as one is so inclined.
One other item of note remains from the sixteenth-century temple: the huge stone walls along Yamato-oji-dori which served to hold the embankment on which the Hokoji was built. These gigantic stones were gifts from Hideyoshi's daimyo, many of these daimyo competing to see if they could send a larger stone from their fiefdom than could other donors. The stones are still in place, today encompassing the grounds of both the Hokoji temple and the Hokoku Shrine. The entrance to the present Hokoku Shrine at the head of Shomen-dori is approximately the entrance to the Great Buddha Hall of the past. Before leaving the Hoko-ji, one should be conscious of the Mimizuka mound which was created in front of the Great Buddha Hall of the Hokoji. It reflects the obverse side of the honor given to Hideyoshi in his own day, for it is illustrative of the cruelty of the wars waged by the warriors of that as well as of later times.
MIMIZUKA
The Mimizuka (Ear Mound) is on Shomen-dori just west of where that street intersects with Yamato-oji-dori (west of the entrance to the Hokoku Shrine) and immediately to the west of the children's playground.
The Mimizuka is a mound in which the ears and noses of defeated Koreans were buried after the Korean wars of Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1597. The mound originally stood in front of the gateway to the Daibutsu-den (Hall of the Great Buddha) of the Hokoji, a hall which has now been replaced by the Hokoku Shrine in honor of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The mound is a tall hill surrounded by a fence and topped by a very tall five-tier memorial stone.
In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi determined that he would conquer China, a part of his dream of ruling all of East Asia. He sent a massive army into Korea, penetrating to Pyongyang and to the Tumen River as far as the border of China. Ultimately forced by the Chinese to retreat to the south of Korea, Hideyoshi failed in his quest, and the war merely engendered many casualties on both sides as well as a continuing antagonism with Korea and China. In 1597 he launched a second attempt against Korea so as to reach China. Harassment of his supply lines by Korean armored boats and the combined military forces of Korea and China proved an overwhelming series of obstacles to his expansionist goals. His death in 1598 provided his successors with an excuse for a withdrawal from Korea—until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The custom of victorious armies severing the heads of the defeated enemy for presentation to their commander as a proof of victory proved logistically impractical during these overseas military adventures. Therefore, in 1592, the ears of the defeated enemy were cut off and shipped back to Kyoto in barrels of brine. They were buried in a mound in front of the gateway to the Daibutsu-den of the Hoko-ji of Hideyoshi and marked by five large, circular stones. Again, in November 1598, the ears and, this time, the noses of 38,000 victims of the Japanese forces in Korea were buried in Mimizuka. The noses were hung up by threes for inspection, verification, and counting before they were pickled and shipped. According to some sources, the mound should be called Hanazuka (Nose Mound) since it was noses rather than ears that were shipped and buried.
A moat 12 feet broad was created around a mound 720 feet in circumference and 30 feet high. On top was placed a five-story, 21-foot-tall sotoba (Buddhist shrine) with a 15-foot-wide base. In earlier days, there was a bridge with railings which crossed the moat from the north side. The mound and sotoba were built at Hideyoshi's order, and on June 12,1597, he had three hundred priests chant a requiem prayer for the Korean dead. In former times, when Korean embassies came to the court on official visits, they always worshipped at this mound.
The Mimizuka mound reflects the senseless military ardor of Hideyoshi, and today it remains, ironically, before the Hokoku Shrine, the Shinto memorial to his enshrined spirit.
HOKOKU SHRINE (TOYOKUNI SHRINE)
The Hokoku Shrine, also known as the Toyokuni Shrine, is on Yamato-qji-dori where Shomen-dori meets Yamato-oji-dori, north of the Kyoto National Museum. There is no admission charge to the shrine. Its treasury is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The era of peace and a growing economy, after the devastation that had been visited on Kyoto by the century of civil war, endeared Hideyoshi to the public. His festival occasions, though sometimes brash, also warmed the citizens of Kyoto to his rule. Thus, after his death, one of the popular songs sung by the people at his shrine summarized these feelings:
Who's that
Holding over four hundred provinces
In the palm of his hand
And entertaining at a tea party?
It's His Highness [Taiko]
So mighty, so impressive.
When Hideyoshi gave a tea party, he savored the quiet essence of the tea ceremony as created by tea masters such as Sen-no-Rikyu. On the other hand, he could go to the extremes to which his nature inclined. His passion for tea reached such a height that when he held a tea party for the public at the Kitano Shrine in October of 1587, he invited "even those from China" to attend. One had only to bring a mat to sit on and a tea bowl. Some five thousand people are said to have attended the "tea party."
On Hideyoshi's death, the emperor Go-Yozei in 1599 ordered that a Shinto shrine to Hideyoshi's spirit be constructed at the foot of Amida-ga-mine (Mount Amida) to the east of Higashi-ojidori since in death Hideyoshi was seen as a god. The shrine became a gathering place for the people of Kyoto on the anniversary of Hideyoshi's death, a great festival being held before the shrine. The festival was captured in a painting done on a six-panel folding screen by Kano Naizen (owned by the shrine and on public view in its treasury) in the early 1600s, documenting the admiration of the people for Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
Such esteem for his predecessor concerned the new shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. As a result, through the years Ieyasu did all that was possible to erase Hideyoshi's name insofar as he could. Gradually the shrine and burial place of Hideyoshi were eliminated by Ieyasu.
With the end of the Tokugawa (Edo) era in 1868, however, the new Meiji government began the restoration of Hideyoshi's reputation together with the shrines connected with him. On April 9,1875, the prefecture of Kyoto was sent an imperial order to rebuild the shrine to Hideyoshi. A ten-year reconstruction program gradually restored the Hokoku Shrine to its previous glory—but on a major portion of the grounds of the Hokoji instead of at its original site at the foot of Amida-ga-mine