Yoshiminedera Joya no Kane 2026

Before you go

The bell rung at Yoshiminedera on New Year's Eve has a name of its own: the Yakuyoke no Kane, the bell that wards off calamity.

The temple is the twentieth stop on the Saigoku thirty-three temple pilgrimage, founded in 1029 when Gensan enshrined a Thousand-armed Kannon of his own making. The bell's history runs through Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and his mother Keishōin. Her father, of the Honjō family, prayed to this temple's Yakushi for a daughter; the daughter was born, and in time she became the mother of Tsunayoshi. In gratitude for her birth, Keishōin rebuilt the temple's halls and donated its treasures; the surviving bell tower, Kannon hall, goma hall, guardian shrine, Yakushi hall and sutra hall were all restored through her donations. The bell tower was built in 1686, and in 1687, as Tsunayoshi reached 42, the age traditionally counted as his calamity year, Keishōin presented the bell, which carries an inscription of that year.

Keishōin was born in 1627, the child her father had prayed for at this temple, and 2026 marks four hundred years since her birth; the temple counts her as the great patron of its revival. The gifts she and Tsunayoshi presented to the temple number more than a hundred pieces, among them the Shiki Hanshō scroll, and they remain in the temple's keeping. The grounds also hold a Tahōtō pagoda designated an Important Cultural Property and the Yūryū no Matsu, a five-needle pine more than six hundred years old designated a Natural Monument; on the last night of the year, visitors pass between these halls and trees on their way to the bell. The grounds, some 30,000 tsubo on the flank of the Nishiyama hills, form a circuit garden whose basis was laid by the seventh-generation garden designer Ogawa Jihei in the Taishō and early Shōwa years.

The temple describes the New Year's Eve ringing plainly: strike the calamity-warding bell, quiet the ill in the heart, clear away the old of the old year and meet the new year. The first 108 people to ring receive a sweet, which the temple calls an ofukuwake, a sharing of good fortune; after the first 108, anyone may still ring freely.