Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall

Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall: A 3.3-Metre Fence with Its Own Registration

Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall (鳴海杻神社藩塀) is a free-standing screen fence on the central approach to Narumi Tegashi Shrine in the Haguro district of Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, built around 1917 (Taishō 6) and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2024 (Reiwa 6). The national database gives its reading as banpei and its length as 3.3 metres.

A banpei is a short screen set across the approach path between the torii and the worship hall. It is not a gate and it does not enclose anything. It stands on the axis and interrupts the sightline, so that a visitor cannot look straight from the entrance into the place where prayers are offered. You walk around it.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the form a screen fence particular to Owari, the old province that covered western Aichi Prefecture. Travellers who have visited many shrines elsewhere in Japan often reach this part of the country before they see one, and then start seeing them everywhere.

A Structure, Not a Building

Among the 6 buildings and structures registered at the shrine together in 2024, Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall is the only one classified as a structure rather than a building. It also has its own street address, 109-1, distinct from the 109 shared by the others. Registration number 23-0598 places it last in the group, after the main hall, the ceremonial hall, the worship hall, the shrine office and the Benten hall.

Like 5 of the 6, it was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. The wording in the national database is worth reading closely, because it explains what a 3.3-metre fence is doing on a national register at all: it is described as an accent in the landscape of the precinct. Registration in Japan protects the character of a place, and the screen fence is part of how this precinct is composed. Remove it and the approach becomes a corridor with nothing to slow the eye.

The registration system is deliberately light-touch. Owners keep using registered property, adaptation is permitted so long as the exterior is not greatly altered, and the state contributes half the design and supervision cost of repairs. That flexibility is why modest things, a fence among them, can enter the register at all.

How It Is Built

The screen is 3 bays wide under a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof sheathed in copper. Looking at it from the side, the framing logic becomes clear quickly.

The columns at each end are round in section. Fore and aft of them stand square bracing posts, and the round column is tied to its bracing posts by 2 tiers of nuki, penetrating tie-beams that pass through the timber rather than sitting against it. This is what keeps a wall 3.3 metres long and barely any thickness from moving in the wind.

Above, the tops of the posts carry 2 stacked tiers of udegi, cantilevered arms, which in turn support the eaves purlin. The rafters over them are single-tier and closely spaced. That is a simpler eave than the double-tier rafters of the worship hall standing behind it, and the difference in rank between the 2 is legible at a glance once you know to look.

The face of the screen is divided horizontally. Between the lower Nageshi and the lintel-height Nageshi runs a band of renji, a lattice of closely set vertical bars. Below that, the lower panel is boarded vertically. The lattice is the point: the screen blocks the line of sight without blocking light or air, and from certain angles the worship hall shows through it in slices.

Copper on the roof rather than tile is a small mark of care. It is light, which suits a slender structure, and it weathers to the dull green that reads as age.

Seeing It

The screen stands where the approach reaches the worship hall, so any visitor walking up the central path from the torii meets Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall before anything else. Nothing is enclosed and nothing is gated; the whole object is visible from both faces in a few seconds, which is precisely why most people walk past without registering that it is a listed structure.

The shrine is at Narumigō, Haguro, Inuyama City, with Haguro Station on the Meitetsu Komaki Line about 1.1 kilometres to the west, roughly 15 minutes on foot. Haguro is 1 stop south of Inuyama Station on the same company's network.

No admission fee or opening hours have been published for the precinct, and no notice restricting photography has been published. Because Narumi Tegashi Shrine Screen Wall is an outdoor structure on the approach path, none of that affects seeing it. For current conditions, the Historical Townscape Division of the Inuyama City Board of Education, telephone 0568-44-0354, is the office responsible for registered buildings in the city.

A photographer's note: the rear face, seen from between the screen and the worship hall, shows the bracing posts and the tie-beams that the front face partly conceals.