Multilingual AI audio guide exhibit on WOUDiO (PWA). WOUDiO pioneered the world’s first audio guide platform with built-in donation: listeners can support the cultural venue without leaving the listening experience. The text below is the localized description, details, and narration script for this audio guide stop.
On a corner of Komachi Oji in Kamakura stands a small stone monument. It marks the site of Nichiren's street preaching. In the middle of the Kamakura period, it is said, the monk Nichiren stood here by the roadside and preached his teachings to the people.
Nichiren was born in a seaside village in the province of Awa, on the Boso Peninsula. After studying at Mount Hiei and elsewhere, he came to Kamakura in the early 1250s. He built a small hermitage at Matsubagayatsu, and from there went out into the town to speak directly to the people passing by.
Kamakura in those days was a capital overflowing with warriors, merchants, craftsmen and people who had drifted in from the provinces. Famine, epidemics and earthquakes came one after another, and people's anxieties ran deep. Rather than wait inside a temple, Nichiren stood in the streets where people gathered. Some listened, it is said, and some threw stones.
In time, Nichiren wrote the Rissho Ankoku Ron, On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land, and presented it to the shogunate, urging it to set right the disorder of the age. His fierce criticism brought him into conflict with the shogunate, and he was sent into exile twice.
Around the monument today is a quiet residential neighborhood. Nearly eight hundred years ago, one monk's voice rang out along this street.
Komachi Oji runs south past this monument and on to the sea. And from the end of this road, a coastal road leads on to Tatsunokuchi, where Nichiren would later come close to being beheaded.
