Fujisawa Enemy Memorial Tower

A Stone for Foe and Friend Alike

Just inside the eastern gate of Shōjōkō-ji, a temple in the city of Fujisawa, a weathered square pillar of stone rises from a low base. It carries the six characters of the nenbutsu, Namu Amida Butsu, and an inscription recording why it was raised: to console the spirits of everyone who died in a rebellion that swept the Kantō region in the early 1400s, whichever side they had fought for.

This is the Fujisawa Teki-Mikata Kuyōtō. The name resists a tidy translation. Teki means enemy; mikata, one's own side; kuyōtō, a pagoda raised for memorial rites. A memorial pagoda for foe and friend comes close. The Agency for Cultural Affairs placed it on the register of National Historic Sites on 20 October 1926.

Shōjōkō-ji is far better known by another name, Yugyō-ji, and it is the head temple of the Ji school of Pure Land Buddhism. The monument stands among the temple's everyday traffic of visitors, easy to walk past. The idea carved into it was, for its time, close to radical.

The Rebellion of 1416

In the tenth month of Ōei 23 (1416), Uesugi Ujinori took up arms against Ashikaga Mochiuji, the Kamakura kubō who governed the eastern provinces on behalf of the Ashikaga shogunate. Ujinori is remembered by his Buddhist name, Zenshū, and the conflict carries it: the Uesugi Zenshū Rebellion. He had served as Mochiuji's deputy and broke with him over the rivalries that ran through Kamakura politics.

The fighting spread quickly across the Kantō plain. The shogunate in Kyoto sided with Mochiuji and sent forces against the rebels. Within a few months Zenshū's cause collapsed, and in early 1417 he took his own life.

Fujisawa lay close enough to the campaign to feel it directly. Yugyō-ji received wounded soldiers and the bodies of the dead, and some men ended their lives inside the temple grounds. According to records held by the Fujisawa city archives, the casualties were not only soldiers; warhorses fell in numbers as well.

The temple did not stand apart from the suffering. The fourteenth head priest of the Ji school, known as Taikū, led the resident monks and people from the nearby district in gathering the injured of both armies for treatment and burying the dead without asking whose banner they had carried. In Ōei 25 (1418), at the third memorial service for the fallen, the stone monument was raised over them. Local histories name Mochiuji, the victor, as the patron who commissioned it, with Taikū officiating the rite.

One detail is recorded inconsistently. The descriptive note compiled when the site was designated in 1926 reads the inscribed date as Ōei 33 (1426), while the account kept by the temple and the city places the work in 1418. The gap between the sources has not been reconciled here. What is not in question is that the stone went up within the first decade after the war.

Why the Monument Matters

Medieval Japanese warfare did not, as a rule, extend ceremony to the enemy. The dead of a defeated army might be left where they fell. To raise a single monument for both sides, and to write that intention plainly into the stone, ran against the ordinary practice of the age.

That choice grew directly out of the teaching of the Ji school. Its founder, the wandering preacher Ippen, had travelled the country in the thirteenth century distributing paper slips printed with the nenbutsu and insisting that rebirth in the Pure Land was open to anyone who chanted it: samurai or commoner, devout or doubtful, with no distinction of rank or merit. A faith built on that premise had little ground on which to separate a friendly corpse from an enemy one.

The monument carries a second name that states the idea outright. It is also called the Onshin Byōdō no Hi, the stone of equality between the resented and the beloved. Onshin byōdō is a Buddhist phrase for treating those one hates and those one loves as equals, here applied to the war dead of two armies that had tried to destroy each other.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the pillar as one of the older surviving monuments of its kind in Japan. Stones expressing the same ideal exist elsewhere, but few are this early. It was designated under the criterion covering sites tied to religious worship. Its value lies less in artistry than in what it documents: a moment when a community chose compassion over the logic of victory.

Reading the Stone

The monument is a sekitōba, a stone stupa, cut as a plain square column rather than carved into tiers or figures. At some point it broke a little above its midpoint, and the break is still visible; the pillar standing today has been set back together. It is unpolished work, and that plainness suits it.

The face carries the nenbutsu in bold characters, with the dedicatory inscription below. Reading the worn text in full is difficult, but its substance is what the designation rests on: the rebellion, the dead of both sides, the memorial intention.

You will find the stone just inside the eastern gate of the precincts, a few steps to the left as you enter from the slope side. There is no admission charge to see it. The monument sits in the open, and visitors can approach closely. A signboard nearby gives the background in Japanese.

Around Yugyō-ji

The temple rewards an unhurried visit. Its approach climbs from the old Tōkaidō highway, and the slope outside, Yugyō-ji-zaka, is familiar to many Japanese as part of the route of the Hakone Ekiden, the long-distance relay race run every January.

Inside the precincts, a large ginkgo tree spreads over the central courtyard and turns brilliant yellow in late autumn. The main hall is among the largest temple buildings in the prefecture. A bronze statue of Ippen, staff in hand, marks the school's origins. The temple's treasure house, open for a modest admission, holds painted scrolls and old documents connected to the Ji school and its wandering priests.

A short walk within the grounds leads to Chōshō-in, a sub-temple associated with the legend of Oguri Hangan and the lady Terute-hime, a tragic romance retold for centuries in storytelling and theatre. Graves linked to the tale stand here.

The temple's gate opens toward the former site of Fujisawa-juku, a post station on the Tōkaidō between Edo and Kyoto. Fujisawa today is also a gateway to the Shōnan coast, with Enoshima and its shrine and beaches a short train ride away.