AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Gyokusen-ji, known to locals as Akikawa Fudōson (the Akikawa Fudō temple), is a small Tendai-sect temple in the Ninomiya quarter of Akiruno, on the forested western edge of Tokyo. Its vermillion gate, candlelit fire rituals and gentle, slightly unorthodox statues make it one of the liveliest little temples in the Tama area, and a favorite stop on local history walks.↗↗
What draws visitors is a sense of a temple that has quietly stayed close to everyday people for three centuries: the main hall, gate and bell tower all date to around 1691, a great hackberry in the garden is a city natural monument, and the buildings once served as the village schoolroom. On the 28th of each month, the smell of burning gōma wood and the chatter of a small market fill the grounds.↗↗
A three-hundred-year-old temple in western Tokyo
Gyokusen-ji takes its formal mountain name Jūhō-zan ("Vulture Peak") and its informal nickname Akikawa Fudōson from the Akikawa River valley nearby. The exact founding is lost, but the present main hall, gate and bell tower were completed around Genroku 4 (1691), and an inscribed old bell suggests an earlier hall stood by the Tama River before the temple moved to its current site. In the Edo period it received a 20-koku land grant from the third shōgun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, marking it as a temple of some local standing.
