It's a bright fall morning when I return to Gokokuji Temple, an Important Cultural Property in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward. Exiting Gokokuji Station, it only takes me a few minutes to find the two monks who promised to help me when I visited here earlier: 33-year-old Shinsei Miura and 23-year-old Kenkai Yamada. Today, they are dressed in formal monk's robes and wearing broad smiles.
Standing at the temple's Kannon-do (main hall), built in 1681, Miura points out Otowa-dori behind us, a long pin-straight road that stretches from the temple to Edogawabashi Station, roughly 3.5 kilometers away.
"During the Tokugawa shogunate, this area was planted with medicinal herbs," Miura says, "and the road was created so that shoguns could travel here comfortably. Back then, this was the outer boundary of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Nothing was here — no villages, no houses — only rivers and pines."