Tokujuji Temple Main Hall

Rebuilt After the Earthquake That Broke Inuyama

The main hall of Tokujuji (徳授寺本堂, Tokujū-ji Hondō), a Rinzai Zen temple in the old castle-town district of Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, was rebuilt in 1896 and entered on Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 August 2012.

On the morning of 28 October 1891 the Nobi earthquake tore across the plain north of Nagoya. It remains one of the largest inland earthquakes recorded in Japan, and the fault scarp it left in the ground near Neodani can still be visited. In Inuyama the shaking half-collapsed the castle keep, a building that would later be designated a National Treasure. It also brought down the main hall of Tokujuji.

Five years later the temple had a new one. That building is what stands at the back of the precinct today, facing south, and its interest lies in a choice the rebuilders made.

By 1896 Japan had spent a quarter of a century importing Western construction. Brick, truss roofs, sash windows, and the seismic anxieties that the Nobi earthquake itself had just sharpened. A temple rebuilding after a disaster in that decade had licence to try something new. Tokujuji did the opposite. The hall went up in orthodox Zen temple carpentry, following a plan type that had been settled for centuries.

The Six-Room Plan and Its Logic

The building measures 15.1 metres along the front and 14.2 metres in depth, under a hip-and-gable roof of pantile, covering roughly 235 square metres. A broad veranda, the hiroen, runs along the front.

Inside, the plan is the hojo type divided into six rooms. It began as the layout of a Zen abbot's residence and was adopted so widely for main halls that it became the default in the Rinzai and Soto schools: three rooms across the front, three behind, with the central rear room housing the altar.

The inner sanctuary follows convention. Behind the altar platform stands a raigobeki, the wall that closes off the sanctuary and traditionally carries a painting of the Buddha's descent. The altar itself sits on a shumidan, the tiered platform representing Mount Sumeru. Overhead runs a kogumi gotenjo, a coffered ceiling with fine secondary lattice inside each panel, which is the more laborious version of a coffered ceiling and reads as considerably richer.

The carpenters' real decision shows in the outer worship space.

A six-room plan normally means columns standing at the internal room boundaries. Here those columns were left out, so the outer hall opens as one uninterrupted space. Where the partitions would have met the ceiling, the transoms are take-no-fushi ranma, a plain type using slender horizontal members with node-like details rather than carved openwork. The restraint is deliberate: elaborate transoms would have re-imposed visually the divisions the structure had just removed. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the result as a broad outer sanctuary, and standing in it, the word fits.

Repair work was carried out in 2006.

A Temple That Once Housed an Army

Tokujuji was founded in 1476 under the name Tokujuin by Hakutei Sosho, with Toin Gensaku installed as founding abbot. Its mountain name is Ryogisan, it belongs to the Myoshinji branch of Rinzai Zen, and its enshrined image is the Sacred Kannon.

The temple's most consequential week came in 1584. Toyotomi Hideyoshi's forces and the allied armies of Oda Nobukatsu and Tokugawa Ieyasu were manoeuvring across this stretch of country in the campaign known as the Komaki and Nagakute campaign. Mori Nagayoshi and Ikeda Tsuneoki requisitioned Tokujuji's halls and several of its subtemples as quarters before moving out to encamp on Chausuyama at Gakuden. Neither man survived the battle at Nagakute.

Five of the temple's buildings now carry registration: the main hall, the memorial tablet hall, the entrance, the bell tower and the gate. The last three date to 1934.

The temple also holds art. A sculpted portrait of the founder Hakutei Sosho is designated by Aichi Prefecture. A standing Sacred Kannon by Enku, the seventeenth-century itinerant monk who left tens of thousands of roughly chiselled images across central Japan, is designated by Inuyama City, as are three Buddhist paintings.

Visiting, and What Else Is Nearby

Tokujuji sits at 232 Minamikoken in the Inuyama castle-town grid, roughly ten minutes on foot from Inuyama Station on the Meitetsu lines. The precinct can be entered and the main hall seen from outside; there is no admission charge and no ticket office. The interior is not on regular public view, and anyone hoping to see the inner sanctuary or the temple's designated artworks should contact the temple beforehand rather than arriving in hope.

One practical note. A kindergarten operated by the Tokuju educational foundation stands in the grounds. Morning drop-off and afternoon collection are busy, and photography in the precinct at those times is best avoided altogether.

The location is the argument for going. Inuyama escaped wartime bombing, so the castle, the moat lines and the block plan of the merchant town all survive together, and the walk from the station to the castle passes through an intact Edo-period street grid rather than a reconstruction of one. Inuyama Castle keeps one of Japan's twelve original castle towers and is a National Treasure. Haritsuna Shrine sits below it.

Time a visit for the first weekend of April and the Inuyama Festival takes over the streets: thirteen tiered floats, mechanical puppets performing on the upper tiers, and after dark several hundred paper lanterns on each. The festival was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2016 as part of the group nomination of Japanese float festivals. Summer brings cormorant fishing on the Kiso River below the castle, which runs in daylight sessions as well as the traditional evening ones.