Kakuoji Temple Priests' Quarters

Kakuō-ji's Kuri: The Working Heart of a Zen Temple

A small wooden vent breaks the long ridgeline of the gabled building on the north side of Kakuō-ji's grounds. It is easy to walk past on the way to the main hall, but it tells you exactly what you are looking at. This is the kuri, the kitchen and living quarters of the temple, and that vent once drew off the smoke of its cooking fires. In a Zen monastery the kuri is where the everyday community happens: meals are prepared, accounts are kept, guests are received, and the resident priest and family live. The ceremonial life belongs to the hall next door; the practical life belongs here.

The kuri at Kakuō-ji was raised in 1840, in the final decades of the Edo period. The temple itself sits in Fusō, a town in the flat farming country of northern Aichi Prefecture, between the Kiso River and the city of Inuyama. Kakuō-ji belongs to the Myōshin-ji branch of the Rinzai school of Zen. By its own records it was founded in 1330 as a Tendai temple and changed to Rinzai Zen in 1510, and the precinct you walk through today took its present shape across the late Edo period.

Why a Temple Kitchen Was Registered

The kuri is one of five buildings at Kakuō-ji listed in 2005 as National Registered Tangible Cultural Properties. This is worth pausing over, because the registration category is not the same as the better-known National Treasure or Important Cultural Property designations. Registration is a lighter form of protection, introduced in 1996, aimed at the large stock of older buildings, many of them fifty years or more in age, that give a place its historical character. A property can be registered under one of several criteria; the Kakuō-ji kuri qualifies as a model of architectural design.

What earns it that standing is partly sheer scale. The building runs roughly twenty-four meters along its long side, an unusually generous frontage for a temple kitchen, and its single-story wooden frame covers about four hundred square meters under a tiled roof. The ridge runs north to south, the gable forms the entrance front, and the roof is finished in pantiles. A working kitchen of this size, kept close to its original 1840 form, is an increasingly rare survivor.

What to Look for When You Visit

Approach the building from its south gable end. This face is the kuri's public side, and it is the one the carpenters chose to dress up. Look along the upper structure for the curved beams known as ebi-kōryō, literally "shrimp beams," named for the way they bow like a prawn's back. They are a flourish of carpentry not strictly needed to hold the building up, and they signal that even the temple's kitchen was meant to be handsome.

Inside, the plan divides cleanly between work and reception. The southern portion is an earthen-floored doma, the standing-and-working kitchen where fires once burned beneath the smoke vent overhead. The raised, matted area behind it splits east and west along the line of the ridge. Tucked into the northwest corner is a fifteen-mat formal room fitted with a tokonoma alcove and built-in shelving, the dignified space where a guest of standing would have been seated. A corridor on the west side links the kuri directly to the main hall, so that the practical and ceremonial halves of the temple were always within a few steps of each other.

Because the kuri remains the priest's residence and office, its interior is not generally open to visitors. The reward here is in reading the outside: the proportion of the great roof, the smoke vent, the decorated gable, and the way the building sits in its row of older neighbors.

Around the Temple

The kuri does not stand alone. Four other buildings at Kakuō-ji carry the same 2005 registration, and together they make an unusually complete Edo-period precinct. The main hall dates to 1814 and follows the abbot's-quarters layout typical of a Zen temple. The small Dainichi-dō, built in 1794, is the oldest of the group. Most rewarding to seek out is the bell tower, a finely worked structure on a stone base with a skirted lower story and a board ceiling painted with heavenly maidens; it was built by Ōtake Risaemon, remembered as a master carpenter of the old Owari domain. The single-bay main gate completes the set.

The approach has its own atmosphere. A pond in front of the gate is crowded with small stone figures of Jizō and Kannon, and one visitor likened the view back toward the gate to a medieval fortified residence rather than a country temple. The grounds are walkable and quietly kept, with seasonal azaleas among the trimmed plantings.

Kakuō-ji lies a short distance from the Meitetsu Inuyama Line, reached from Fusō or Kizu-yōsui stations by taxi or on foot, and the temple keeps a free car park with room for several dozen vehicles. It also stands as the twenty-first station on the local Fusō pilgrimage of twenty-one Daishi halls.