Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 546.

You got a fight for your right to party, part three.

If you've been to Tokyo, you've almost certainly spent at least sometime in Asaksa.

It's a beautiful neighborhood along the Camo River, a classic bit of the Stamachi, the lower town,

where once upon a time, the commoners who labored

in the Shogun's capital worked and lived. It was actually, literally the first place I ever went

to in Japan, well, aside from Narita Airport, I spent my first night ever in the country

at a youth hostel there in the summer of 2006 with some friends right after I graduated

from high school. It's a place I'll never forget, and not just because the bad takoyaki

I got on the way to the youth hostel made me sick, though that was definitely memorable.

No, part of what made it memorable was, of course, seeing the grand temple of Senzolji

for the first time.

That temple is the iconic symbol of Asaksa as a neighborhood.

Its official history states that it was founded back in the 600s when Tokyo was still

Edo, and Edo was at best a sleepy fishing village, and when the Kanto plains the

city now sprawls over, were considered wild, untamed country.

The story goes that two brothers, Hino Kuma no Hamanari and Hino Kumma no Takanari, were fishing

in the Sumida River when their net snagged on something.

They pulled out whatever it was to discover a statue of Kanon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of

mercy, known in Chinese as Guanian and in Sanskrit as Avilokitashvara.

They took the statue to a well-known local wise man, Haji no Nakamoto, who identified what the statue was

and built a temple to house it dedicated to the deity.

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