Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters

The Working Half of a Castle-Town Temple

Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters (専念寺庫裏, Sennen-ji Kuri) is the residence and administrative building of a Jōdo-sect temple in Nishikoken, Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, built in 1689 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on December 5, 2007. It is a single-story timber building of 216 square meters, standing east of the main hall and facing south.

The building measures 21 meters along the ridge and 11 meters across. Its roof is Kirizuma-zukuri, a simple gable, laid with Sangawara-buki pantiles, and the entrance is on the gable end, an arrangement called Tsumairi. The main hall next door carries a hipped-and-gabled roof with a projecting canopy; Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters takes the shorter, domestic form. The two roof shapes alone tell you which building did which job.

A kuri houses the kitchen, the temple office, and the priest's family. Worshippers do not enter it, yet the daily running of the temple happened here. The interior of Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters is laid out precisely for that combination of work and home life.

Repairs were carried out in 2004, the same year as those on the main hall. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives the date as 1689 with a 2004 renovation.

Why Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters Was Registered

The criterion applied here is contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The registration number is 23-0263, from the fifty-seventh round, announced on December 19, 2007. The main hall was registered under a different criterion, as a model of its building type, so the two buildings on this one precinct entered the register for different reasons.

Age counted for a good deal. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters as a kuri going back to the middle Edo period. Priests' quarters are living buildings, rebuilt as families and habits change, and few from the seventeenth century survive as complete structures.

The internal arrangement also remains legible. An earth-floored work area occupies the front of the building. Behind it, the raised timber floor is divided lengthwise into two. The western half holds the formal rooms, fitted with a Tokonoma alcove and used for receiving parishioners and guests. The eastern half is inward-facing, given over to the priest's family. Guests to one side, household to the other: a plain principle that keeps a 21-meter building from becoming a corridor.

Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters and the Inuyama Castle Town

The landscape criterion makes sense once you know where Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters stands. Inuyama was a sogamae castle town, ringed by a moat and an earthen rampart that enclosed the merchant quarters as well as the castle. The city's historic landscape plan records that the northwestern stretch of that rampart ran between Jomanji temple and Sennenji. The precinct sits at the inner edge of the town's defensive line.

A castle-town map of 1681 shows nine gates controlling entry to the town. One of them, the Nakagiri gate, stood directly in front of Sennenji. The priests' quarters went up in 1689, eight years after that map was drawn, at a time when the ground outside the temple gate was one of the official ways in and out of Inuyama.

The rampart and moat disappeared quickly after 1868; the same plan notes their loss near Sennenji-zaka, the slope named for the temple. With the defensive works gone, what still traces the outline of the Edo-period town is the buildings, and Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters is one of them. That is the reasoning behind its registration.

Visiting Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters

This is a private home as well as a cultural property. There is no admission system and no fee, the interior is closed, and viewing is limited to the exterior as seen from the precinct. Look for the gable-fronted roof standing east of the main hall.

A licensed nursery school operates on the temple grounds, and children are present through the weekday daytime. Do not photograph anyone, keep exterior photography to personal use, and ask the temple first if you intend to publish or sell images.

Meitetsu Inuyama Station is about 15 minutes away on foot from the west exit, roughly 1.1 kilometers. Meitetsu Inuyama-guchi Station is also about 15 minutes. The approach runs off the street one block west of Honmachi-dori; through the gate, the main hall is ahead of you and Sennenji Temple Priests' Quarters is to the right.

These visiting details were checked on September 1, 2026. Since people live in the building, please keep your visit brief and quiet.