Senso-ji Temple

Welcome to Tokyo's oldest temple — and one of the most visited religious sites on Earth, pulling in over thirty million people a year. But here is the truly wild part. This entire place exists because of a tiny golden statue that nobody has ever been allowed to see. Not once. Not ever. In six twenty-eight AD, two fishermen hauled a small golden figure of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, out of the Sumida River. The statue is roughly five and a half centimetres tall. A local chief recognised its significance and converted his home into a temple to enshrine it. Nearly fourteen hundred years later, that statue remains sealed away. The figure occasionally put on display is actually a replica carved by the priest Ennin in the ninth century. The original has never been shown to the public.

That iconic gate you walked through — Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate, with its massive red lantern — burned down in eighteen sixty-five and was not rebuilt for ninety-five years. The gate you see today only dates from nineteen sixty, funded by the founder of Panasonic. Before that, there was just an empty space where the gate used to be.

The temple has been through extraordinary trauma. It survived the eighteen twenty-three Great Kanto Earthquake thanks to a local construction master who organised a bucket brigade and saved most of the complex. But it did not survive the Second World War. On March tenth, nineteen forty-five, American B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs across eastern Tokyo, and Senso-ji was completely destroyed. What you see now was rebuilt in the nineteen fifties using reinforced concrete instead of wood. The temple looks ancient, and its history stretches back almost fourteen centuries, but the physical structures are younger than your grandparents.