Hozomon Gate

Through Hozomon Gate, the road from the Nakamise shopping street enters the courtyard of Sensoji Temple. This is the main inner gate: three passageways are arranged below, two wooden Nio guardians stand at the sides, and above them is a closed storehouse of ancient books. This is where the name Hozomon Gate—“treasure-house gate”—comes from.

The main collection upstairs came to Asakusa thanks to the Buddhist nun Teiun. In eighteen sixty-eight, the new government ordered Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples to be separated. Before that, they could form a single complex; this was also the case at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine in Kamakura. After the separation, Buddhist objects began to be removed from there, and a collection of canonical texts printed in China during the Yuan dynasty faced burning.

Teiun wanted to save more than five thousand volumes and hand them over to a large temple capable of keeping such a collection. She raised money by going among people with an alms bowl. With these donations, the nun bought back the books and handed them over to Sensoji Temple in September eighteen seventy-one.

Tatsugoro Shimmon, head of the Tenth Company of city firefighters, helped transport the thousands of volumes from Kamakura. About a decade before that, he had paid for the construction of a separate book storehouse on the grounds of Sensoji Temple. His men now delivered there the collection that Teiun had managed to buy back.

On March tenth, nineteen forty-five, an air raid destroyed the old Niomon Gate and that very book storehouse. The canon had been evacuated by then, so the volumes did not burn. After the war, they needed a new protected space.

Yonetaro Otani, president of a metallurgical company, and his wife paid for the gate's restoration. Builders erected the present structure of reinforced concrete, covered it with a traditional tiled roof, and equipped the upper floor with a storehouse and an alarm system. On April first, nineteen sixty-four, the gate opened under its new name. The former name, Niomon Gate, was retained as a second name because of the two temple guardians below.

Teiun's collection cannot be seen from the ground: it lies directly above the people passing through the gate. The name Hozomon Gate itself signals its presence.