Kakuoji Temple Main Hall

A Hall of 1814, Laid Out Like an Abbot's Quarters

Kakuoji Temple Main Hall (覚王寺本堂, Kakuōji Hondō) is the principal hall of Kakuōji, a Rinzai Zen temple in the town of Fusō in northern Aichi Prefecture; it was built in 1814 and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005. The hall faces close to due south under a hip-and-gable roof laid with pantiles, and it covers 354 square meters of ground.

The temple is a great deal older than the building. Fusō town records date its founding to 1330, when it belonged to the Tendai school, and its conversion to Rinzai Zen to 1510. Roughly three centuries separate that change of school from the hall standing on the site today.

Four other buildings share the precinct: a Dainichi hall, the priests' quarters, a bell tower and the gate. Agency for Cultural Affairs records place the Dainichi hall to the southwest of Kakuōji's main hall, and all five buildings carry the same registration date.

What the 2005 Listing Recognized

The main hall was entered on the register on July 12, 2005, with public notice following on August 2. The criterion applied was the one for buildings that serve as a standard of design, which asks not for scale or display but for a clear demonstration of how buildings of a given period were put together.

Five buildings at Kakuōji went onto the register together that day: the Dainichi hall of 1794, this main hall of 1814, the priests' quarters of 1840, the gate of 1902 and the bell tower of 1934. Around one hundred and forty years of building campaigns, running from the late Edo period into the early Shōwa era, survive side by side in one compound. The main hall is the second oldest of the five.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs reads the hall as a building of restrained decoration whose tall proportions place it in the later Edo period. Japanese carpenters use the word tachi for how much height is given to posts and roof; two halls with the same floor plan can sit quite differently on the ground depending on it. Dating a plain building by its overall balance rather than by carved detail says something about what kind of building this is.

Six Rooms, and a Floor That Does Not Show

What repays attention at Kakuōji's main hall is the arrangement of rooms rather than any carving. A broad veranda called a hiroen runs the width of the front. Behind it sit six rooms in two ranks of three. The plan is the one used for a hōjō, the abbot's quarters of a Zen temple, borrowed here for the main hall; the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the building in exactly those terms.

The central rank is where ceremonies take place. A room called the shitchū holds the middle, flanked by the jōkan and gekan on either side. The partitions between them are transom panels of the take-no-fushi type, slender bars shaped to suggest the joints of bamboo, which let light and sound pass from one room to the next. A coffered ceiling runs across all three rooms without a break. Open the partitions and the three become one long space with the ceiling grid continuing overhead, which appears to be the point of building it that way.

In the rear rank, the upper inner room is divided in two. Above it sits a floor that barely registers from outside. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls it a yatsushi second storey, using a word that means toned down or kept out of sight. The same record lists the structure as single-storey timber, which tells you how completely the upper level disappears from the exterior.

Stand in front of the hall and look first at the height of the eaves and the pitch of the roof. Pantiles cover a wide hip-and-gable expanse, and the veranda draws a long horizontal beneath it. There is little ornament to catch the eye. The interest lies in the balance between that height and that horizontal.

Visiting Kakuōji's Main Hall

Kakuōji is a working temple where services are still held, not a visitor attraction. The exterior of the main hall can be seen from the grounds. No public opening hours, admission desk or entry fee are published for the interior by either the temple or the town of Fusō, so anyone hoping to see inside should contact the temple in advance.

Photography of the exterior from the grounds is not normally a problem. Point a camera into the hall or shoot during a service and it is; the same applies to setting up a tripod, which is worth asking about first.

The nearest station is Fusō on the Meitetsu Inuyama Line, about eleven minutes on foot to the southeast, a distance of roughly 900 meters. Trains run through from central Nagoya on the same line, and Kizuyōsui, one stop south, is also within walking distance. Questions about the buildings as cultural properties go to the Lifelong Learning Division of the Fusō town office, on 0587-93-5200.