Shunkoin Temple Main Entrance and Study

The Main Entrance and Shoin of Shunkoin: A House That Moved

The shoin of Shunkoin did not begin life as part of the temple. According to local accounts, the reception wing was dismantled and brought here in 1879 from the home of Takeda Shokuro, the man credited with founding Arimatsu shibori, the tie-dyed cloth that made the nearby post town of Arimatsu famous. A merchant's residence became a Zen temple's guest quarters, and the join is still legible in the building's parts.

The shoin stands west of the main hall, a single-story timber building of about 182 square meters under a tiled roof. Between the two runs the formal entrance, the hongenkan, made up of a corridor and a tatami room with a raised step-board platform, the shikidai, set at the center of its north face. The shikidai is the architectural sign of a formal welcome, the place where a ranking guest was once received.

Shunkoin is a Soto Zen temple founded in 1556 by Mizuno Daizen, lord of Odaka Castle, in memory of his father. The grounds escaped the bombing of the Pacific War, and the entrance and shoin survive as one of seven structures on the precinct entered on the national register in 2005.

Why the Entrance and Shoin Were Registered

Registration in July 2005 recognized the building as a well-kept example of late Edo and Meiji residential carpentry adapted to temple use. Its value lies partly in its history of relocation and partly in how much of the original interior remains. The reception suite pairs a twelve-mat room fitted with the full set of formal features, an alcove, staggered shelves, and a built-in writing bay called a tsukeshoin, with an eighteen-mat room that carries its own alcove. An L-shaped broad veranda wraps the two rooms.

Much of what makes the rooms worth study is small in scale. The joinery of the sliding screens and the openwork transoms, the ranma, is finely cut, and a good deal of the original painted decoration has come down intact, including screen paintings and panel paintings on the fittings. A house that changed hands and changed function rarely keeps this much of its interior finish.

What to Look For on a Visit

Look first at the transoms above the sliding partitions. The Arimatsu merchant who once owned this wood could afford carving of real delicacy, and the carpenters who reassembled it for the temple kept that refinement in place. Among the screen paintings, a composition of white egrets is handed down as the work of Kano Eishu, an attribution that has long been attached to the room though it is not documented beyond tradition.

The shoin is a place to slow down and read detail rather than scale. Where the main hall impresses by its proportions, the reception wing rewards a closer look at how a wealthy townsman of the Owari region furnished his finest rooms, and how those rooms found a second life inside a temple a short walk from Odaka Castle. Interiors are not always open, so it is worth checking with the temple before a visit.