Nikkō Tōshō-gū

In September 1634 Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun, made a pilgrimage to his grandfather's shrine and ordered its replacement for the twenty-first memorial year in 1636. The chief magistrate Akimoto Yasutomo directed the project; the building itself was the work of the shogunate's chief carpenter, Kōra Munehiro, who led carpenters drawn from Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, and who had already built the Taitoku-in mausoleum at Zōjō-ji. What they raised in barely two years still stands as the fullest statement of Edo-period ornament: some forty structures in gongen-zukuri form, their timber frames lacquered, gilded and carved in deep relief, culminating in the Yōmeimon, a gate so densely worked it was nicknamed higurashi-no-mon, the gate you could watch until sundown without tiring. Hidari Jingorō is credited with its most famous small carving, a sleeping cat. On completion Kōra received the fourth court rank; he retired the same year, leaving the shogunate's works office to his descendants for eleven more generations.