Hōzen-ji Mizukake Fudō

Hōzen-ji began in the late 1620s or early 1630s at Kitayama village in Uji, outside Kyoto, founded by a priest named Kin'un. His successor, Chūyo Sennen, moved the temple to Namba in 1637. The temple's records have Kin'un dying in 1686 at the age of 77, so the Uji years were brief.

In the Edo period, the outskirts of Namba held cremation grounds, cemeteries, and an execution ground. Sennen chanted the nembutsu for 1,000 days as a memorial to the people buried there. The temple became known as Sennichi-dera, the Thousand Days Temple, and the district in front of its gate is still called Sennichimae.

The air raid

The temple burned and was rebuilt twice in the 1800s. On the night of March 13, 1945, the first of Osaka's large air raids began: 274 B-29 bombers dropped incendiaries until the morning of March 14 and burned about 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) of the city center. All six of Hōzen-ji's halls burned.

The temple's history says the Mizukake Fudō alone remained in the burned ground. Its deputy chief priest, Shinei Kanda, gave a slightly longer list in a 2025 interview with FUN! JAPAN: the Fudō, the Konpira figure beside it, and the well that supplies the water.

Within 15 years of the war's end, the temple had rebuilt its Konpira hall and its living quarters, but not a main hall. Its principal image, an Amida Buddha, went to Chōen-ji, a Jōdo-shū temple in Tennōji Ward that has served as Hōzen-ji's branch temple since. The temple describes its postwar rebuilding as half finished. A full main hall is still planned, and a small hall illustrating the Pure Land parable of the two rivers and the white path opened beside the Fudō in September 2009.

The first splash

The temple dates the water to the years right after the war. Its history says a woman came to pray, scooped up the water set out as an offering in front of the statue, and threw it on the Fudō. Other worshippers copied her. In Japanese, to pour water is mizu wo kakeru and to make a wish is gan wo kakeru, and the pun carried the custom along. The temple's history does not name the woman.

The figure is a Nishimuki Fudō Myōō, a west-facing Fudō, the wrathful guardian who holds a sword and a rope in front of a halo of flames. The temple counts it among Osaka's three great Fudō, with those at Taiyū-ji in Umeda and Kiyomizu-dera in Kōzu. Its records give no date for the statue itself.

The moss

Kanda told FUN! JAPAN that the moss depends on four things: a stone that takes moss easily, well water with no chlorine in it, moderate sun, and moving air. He said it looks best from January to May and suffers in the summer heat.

The alley

Hōzenji Yokochō, two stone-paved alleys on the temple's north side, grew out of stalls that sold to worshippers inside the temple grounds. The alleys run about 260 feet and are less than 10 feet wide, with about 60 restaurants and bars along them. The sweet shop named in Oda Sakunosuke's 1940 novel Meoto Zenzai still trades next to the Fudō.

Fires in September 2002 and April 2003 badly damaged the shops around the temple. Building law would have required the alleys to be widened before they were rebuilt. More than 300,000 people signed to keep them as they were, and they came back at the old width. On September 9, 2004, a Jizō statue thanking the people who helped was set into a corner of the alley.

The Fudō and the other shrines in the grounds are open 24 hours a day at no charge. The temple office, which sells goshuin stamps, charms, prayer beads, votive plaques, and fortunes, is open 10am to 6pm. A goshuin cost 500 yen and a charm 1,000 yen in July 2025, and the office does not take cards.

Visitors splash water over the statue with a ladle. The temple's own guidance is to pour water on the part of the figure that matches the part of the body you hope to see healed. For those hoping to meet someone, it suggests pouring gently over the two small attendant figures, Kongara Dōji and Seitaka Dōji, taken as a man and a woman.

On the 28th of every month, a goma fire ritual for the Fudō runs from 7pm to 8:30pm, with offerings of 500 or 300 yen. The Konpira festival falls on October 9 and 10, when the doors of the Konpira shrine open for about 1 hour in the evening to show its hidden image. The moss is at its best from January to May.

The temple is 1 minute north of exit B16 of the Namba Walk underground mall. There is no parking and there are no coin lockers. People come to pray morning and night, so it's best practice to frame photos so that worshippers are not in them.