Masakado's Mound (将門塚)

In the Heian era, Taira no Masakado — the rebel who shook the eastern provinces — was slain, and his head was sent to the imperial capital. Yet legend holds that the head, mounted on its display stand, went on laughing for three days and three nights, then rose into the eastern sky and fell upon the land of his birth. That landing place is Ōtemachi, Chiyoda Ward — and the mound marking it endures to this day, deep within the financial district that drives modern Japan.

Those who dwelt near the mound long suffered under Masakado's vengeful spirit. In the late Kamakura period, the wandering monk Ta-a Shinkō came to this place, raised a stone memorial tablet over the neglected mound, and bestowed upon Masakado the posthumous Buddhist name Ren'amidabutsu. It was not an exorcism but an invitation — a guiding of the spirit toward rebirth, in the distinctive manner of the Ji sect.

Even in the modern age, human hands have more than once attempted to move the mound. During the reconstruction that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake, the mound was cleared away to make room for a temporary Ministry of Finance building. Whispers spread almost immediately of a string of strange misfortunes among those involved, and in response a memorial stone was erected and a grand rite of appeasement was held. Each time the mound was disturbed, something answered — and so the rumor has been born again and again.

After the Second World War, when GHQ considered reorganizing the surrounding lots, the plans are said to have collapsed in peculiar fashion. Whether Masakado's lingering resentment had reached even foreign occupiers, or whether it was mere coincidence, no one can say. Stories whose truth cannot be confirmed are precisely the ones that travel longest from mouth to mouth.

The funds for maintaining the mound were for many years sustained by local volunteers, and the bank account holding those funds was opened at an adjacent bank under the name Taira no Masakado. A thousand years on, a warrior's name registered within the modern financial system — that fact alone has the look of something uncanny.

Today, offerings of food and incense are forbidden at the mound; only coins are accepted, dropped into a box engraved with the nine-disc family crest. The frog figurines that once crowded the precinct were rooted in the legend that the head had "returned" — kaeru, the word for frog, also meaning to go home. Reshaped with each successive restoration, the mound waits quietly between towers of glass and steel, receiving whoever comes to pay their respects today.