Renkyoji Shoin

Renkyoji Temple Shoin

Behind the main hall of Renkyo-ji, linked by a corridor, stands the shoin, the temple's formal reception building. A shoin is a residence-style hall for receiving guests and conducting the dignified business of a temple. This one, raised in 1812 during the Bunka era, is an accomplished example.

Renkyo-ji traces its origins to a founding legend of the late tenth century, when it is said to have begun as a Tendai temple before its conversion to Shinshu Buddhism in 1561. In the Edo period the temple's setting was admired enough to appear in the illustrated gazetteer Owari Meisho Zue. The shoin measures seven and a half bays by six and a half, under a gabled pantile roof, holding six rooms in two ranks of three, wrapped on its east and west sides by wide verandas.

Registered as a Model of Its Type

When the shoin was registered on 2 May 2017 it was listed under a criterion the other Renkyo-ji buildings do not share, that it serves as a model of its architectural type. The judgment rests on the quality of the interior.

The jodan-no-ma, the raised room reserved for the most honoured guest, carries a built-in tsukeshoin desk and a coffered gotenjo ceiling. The finish throughout is careful and consistent, the mark of a well-run temple that could command good carpenters in the early nineteenth century. It is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property.

What to Look For

The pleasure of the shoin is in its proportions and its light. The wide verandas on two sides open the rooms toward the garden, and the entrance sits at the south end of the west face.

The raised room rewards a slow look, from the coffered ceiling overhead to the writing alcove built into the wall and the ordered rhythm of the six-room plan. Renkyo-ji's garden, restored between 2014 and 2016, later won a Nagoya cityscape award, and the shoin is the building that looks out over it.