I am forever grateful that, in those less-xenophobic times in America when I attended Dartmouth College, I was required for my degree to enroll in a certain number of “humanities” classes that were categorized as “Non-Western”, and that my mandatory art and architecture history survey courses substantially explored the historic cultures of Asia. Not only would half the world been effectively closed off for me without this background education, but I (a white kid who literally grew up in a swamp in the rural American south) would not have the ability to get off an airplane on the other side of the planet, see something, and almost immediately have enough of a grasp of the cultural context to begin to interpret the situation that confronts me. 

So even before first visiting Japan over three decades ago, I knew in a basic sort of way who the Shogun was, as distinct from the Emperor; how Edo became Tokyo following the Meiji Restoration of 1868; and what Shinto is, as compared to Buddhism. Nevertheless, there has been a change in my conception of certain aspects of Japanese cultural history. I somehow had the idea from my education days that the various “military governments” or Shogunates — in particular the last, the 265 years of the Tokugawa bakufu — were a kind of antiliberal, insular, feudalistic interruption of a more-legitimate trending Japanese arc-of-progress.

Of course, that’s not correct, and the exuberant, perennially-popular Ukiyo-e prints, products of the supposedly rigid and closed Tokugawa regime, should have made it clear that conception was largely incorrect. Many of the most appealing characteristic traits of modern Japanese culture, I have read and come to believe, were conceived during the long Tokugawa period, when prosperous, exquisitely-refined Edo was the de facto political center of the archipelago and the first city on the planet to top a million inhabitants. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the pragmatic founder of the dynasty and the last of the Three Great Unifiers of the Japan, understood that political and social stability generally transcend most other attributes of any form of government in assuring the populace’s growing prosperity — an insight that certain recent chaos-cultivating world leaders seem to lack.

So I was thinking these sort of thoughts today when I visited wildly-baroque Ueno Toshogu, which is dedicated to Tōshō Daigongen, the gongren of Tokugawa Ieyasu. It’s not Ieyasu’s tomb or even monument in the Western sense, per se, a gongren being a type of kami (Shinto deity or spirit) that is also an incarnation of a buddha. The Tosho-gu is thus technically a place of worship. The weary young ladies selling tickets to tourists were dressed in the traditional red and white of miko (Shinto shrine maidens or female shamans), and I must assume they are.  And so I must also assume that Ieyasu’s gongren like any other kami in theory resides — divine and unchanging — in the unseen sanctuary of the shrine. Incidentally, he also dwells in every other of the 130 remaining Tosho-gu in Japan since kami are subject to bunrei, a sort of spiritual mitosis or soul division. 

Ueno Toshogu is one of the few bits of Ieyasu’s city that have survived the recurrent devastating fires of the last four hundred years, the so-called “Edo Blooms”; the fierce 1868 Battle of Ueno between Shogitai Tokagawa revanchists and the newly-constituted Imperial Army of the restored Meiji Emperor; the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923; and finally the napalm-filled American bombs — 1,665 tons — that reduced so much of Tokyo and so many of its inhabitants to ash on March 9, 1945 in the single deadliest air raid of World War II. 

Within the grounds of the shrine dedicated to the first Tokugawa shogun, the careful proponent of a prudent stasis, appropriately enough his Edo survives.