Myogen-in Old Tahoto Pagoda

A Pagoda That Lost Its Upper Half

In a residential pocket of Ōharu, a small town wedged against the western edge of Nagoya, stands a squat square hall under a single broad hip roof. It does not look like a pagoda. Yet this building is the surviving lower storey of a tahōtō, a two-storeyed Buddhist pagoda whose upper level was taken down after the Nōbi earthquake of 1891 left it badly damaged. What remains is the Former Tahōtō of Myōgen-in, registered in 2014 as a national cultural property.

A tahōtō is a form of pagoda particular to Japan. In its complete shape it has a square lower body, a rounded band of white plaster above it, and a cylindrical upper storey crowned by a pyramidal roof and a metal finial. Here only the square base is left. Because the hall now enshrines a seated figure of Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic buddha of the esoteric Buddhist tradition, local people call it the Dainichi-dō rather than a pagoda at all.

The building belongs to Myōgen-in, a Tendai-sect temple with an unusual past. Tradition holds that it was founded in 802 under the name Anyō-ji, and from the medieval period onward it became known across Japan as a centre of eye medicine. The Majima school of ophthalmology that developed here drew patients from far afield, and the temple is often called the oldest dedicated eye clinic in the country.

Why a Half-Ruined Pagoda Earns Protection

Japan looks after its historic buildings through two parallel systems. The older one designates the most significant structures as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties and governs them strictly. The second, the registration system created in 1996, takes in a wider range of buildings under a lighter regulatory hand. Its aim is to keep owners maintaining and using their properties rather than sealing them away. The Former Tahōtō joined this register on 7 October 2014.

Even reduced to one storey, the structure carries real architectural interest. Four central pillars, round and roughly 27 centimetres across, anchor the interior, while the outer frame uses chamfered square posts about 21 centimetres thick. Strongly curved tie-beams called ebi-kōryō, named for their shrimp-like bend, link the two rings of pillars. Around the eaves the carpenters built an external bracket system, its three-armed brackets finished with carved projections, and filled the spaces between with frog-leg struts and tapering struts shaped like a straw rain-cape. Inside, a coffered ceiling closes the space overhead.

The Owari region around Nagoya preserves an unusually large number of these pagodas, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs values this example as one of that group. Its survival, even partial, records a building type that flourished here.

What to Look For

Stand back from the hall and the loss becomes legible. The heavy roof sits directly on a square body that was never meant to be a final storey; it once supported the rounded drum and cylinder above. The proportions feel compressed, almost stubborn, which is exactly the point of interest.

The dating is not settled, and the building itself records the uncertainty. Temple tradition places its construction in the Muromachi period. A finial fitting carries an inscription dated 1649, in the early Edo period, generally read as the record of a major repair by Enkei, the temple's thirteenth abbot, though some take it to mean that Enkei rebuilt the structure outright. When the upper storey came down after 1891, most of the original finial was removed as well, leaving only two of its rings.

The Dainichi Nyorai inside is a hibutsu, a hidden image kept from ordinary view, so a visit to Myōgen-in is mostly an encounter with the exterior. The carved wooden Niō guardian figures that once stood at the temple gate, attributed on stylistic grounds to sculptors of the Kei school and dated to around 1300, now shelter under a roofed frame on the site of the vanished gate. They are worth seeking out while you are there.

Around Myōgen-in

The temple sits among narrow streets near the Ōharu town hall, a short ride west of central Nagoya by Meitetsu bus. Public access is limited and the halls are not reliably open, so calling ahead is sensible if you hope to see more than the grounds. The garden, traditionally said to have been laid out by the tea master and designer Kobori Enshū during a visit for treatment, is part of the temple's quiet appeal.

If the temple interior is closed, there is a fine consolation that requires no appointment at all. A guest hall once built at Myōgen-in in the mid-eighteenth century, the Ōkyokan, was later moved to the grounds of the Tokyo National Museum, where it stands today in the museum's rear garden. The painter Maruyama Ōkyo, who came to Myōgen-in for eye treatment, is connected to its decoration, and the scholar Motoori Haruniwa, son of the great philologist Motoori Norinaga, also sought care here. Nagoya itself, with its rebuilt castle, the Atsuta Shrine, and the lively Ōsu district, makes an easy base for the day.