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.
Across the Namerikawa River, deep in a valley between the hills, lies a quiet stretch of level ground surrounded by trees. This is the site of Tosho-ji, a temple built as the family temple of the Hojo clan.
May of 1333. The army of Nitta Yoshisada pushed past Inamuragasaki and poured into the streets of Kamakura. As fires broke out across the city, Hojo Takatoki, the last head of the Hojo line to rule the shogunate, fled to this temple in the hills with his clan and retainers.
The Taiheiki chronicle records that here, at this temple, Takatoki and more than eight hundred others took their own lives. And so the Kamakura shogunate, which had lasted nearly a hundred and fifty years, came to its end.
Farther into the valley, on the slope of the hill, there is a yagura, a tomb carved into the cliff. It is called the Harakiri Yagura, and it is said to be a place of memorial for Takatoki and the Hojo clan. The temple was later rebuilt, but it eventually fell into ruin, and today none of its buildings remain. Excavations have uncovered a layer of burnt earth.
The place where the losing side met its end is not preserved like a monument to the victors. It remains in the shadows at the back of a valley, saying little.
Even now, flowers and wooden memorial tablets are laid before the yagura. For nearly eight hundred years, people have never stopped coming to this valley to pray.
From the valley, across the Namerikawa, the road returns in just a few hundred meters to the bustle of Kamakura today.
