The Strangest Place in Edo: the Temple of the Five-Hundred Arhats

Abstract

The Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats has been all but obliterated from historical record. The purpose of the present article is to recoup it, not merely for antiquarian interest, but to suggest something about Edo itself, about how the huge weight that the Shogunate imposed on the city was mitigated and eased, and how life in Edo was lived: plotted out among zones, as it were, of competing experience