Kensoji Temple — Grave of the Twenty-Two Samurai

Kensoji Temple (賢崇寺, Kensōji) is a Soto Zen Buddhist temple located at 1-2-12 Moto-Azabu, Minato Ward, Tokyo, near the Azabu-Juban shopping district. Founded during the Edo period, the temple gained historical significance in the postwar era as the resting place of the executed February 26 Incident officers.

After the nineteen officers were executed by firing squad at the Tokyo Army Military Prison on July 12, 1936, their ashes were placed at Kensoji Temple. During the wartime period and early postwar occupation, the families of the executed men were forbidden from publicly commemorating them. It was not until the end of the Allied Occupation in 1952 that the bereaved families were able to erect a proper memorial.

On July 12, 1952 — the seventeenth anniversary of the executions — a gravestone entitled "Grave of the Twenty-Two Samurai" (二十二士之墓, Nijunishi no Haka) was erected at the temple by the Busshinkai. The "twenty-two" commemorates:

• The nineteen officers executed on July 12, 1936: Muranaka Koji, Isobe Asaichi, Kurihara Yasuhide, Ando Teruzō, Takahashi Tarō, Hayashi Hachirou, Nakahashi Motoaki, Tanbara Naoshi, Sakai Naoshi, Tsuchida Yoshirō (civilians), Nishida Mitsugi (civilian), and the military officers Nonaka Shiro (posthumous — committed suicide), Kōno Hisashi (committed suicide before execution), among others.
• Lieutenant Colonel Saburo Aizawa (相澤三郎), who was executed on July 3, 1936 for his assassination of Major General Tetsuzan Nagata (永田鉄山) in the Aizawa Incident of August 1935.

The grave site is accessible within the temple grounds, which are reached via a stone-paved slope from the street. Joint memorial services (合同慰霊祭) are held annually on February 26 (the date of the incident) and July 12 (the date of the executions). These services are organized by the Busshinkai and attended by descendants and historians.

Kensoji Temple serves as the most intimate and personal of the February 26 Incident memorial sites — while the Shibuya memorial statue is a public monument, the temple graves represent the actual resting place of the men who attempted to reshape Japan's political order through armed insurrection.