Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters

A hall that arrived here in pieces

The Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters is a Buddhist hall of 1813 at Nakamachi in Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2021. It has not always stood on this block. The building was put up somewhere else, taken apart, and rebuilt where it now sits.

Zuihōin (瑞芳院) began as a sub-temple of Myōkōji, the large monastery in the Yamato-chō district of the same city, and the hall was raised inside the Myōkōji precinct in 1813. Then came the Nōbi earthquake of 1891, one of the most destructive inland earthquakes in Japanese record, whose epicentral area covered exactly this part of the Nōbi plain. The hall was damaged. In 1915, during the long recovery that followed, it was dismantled and re-erected on its present site in central Ichinomiya.

So the Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters carries two dates that both matter. 1813 is when the carpenters cut the timber. 1915 is when the building became part of the townscape it belongs to now, a street of shops and houses rather than a monastery's grounds.

Why the Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters was registered

The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended registration to the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology on 16 July 2021, and the entry was made in the register on 14 October of the same year. The register number is 23-0563, from the 100th round of registrations.

The criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape of Japan. Ichinomiya City Museum, in explaining the registration, put the point plainly: this is a building that brings historic character to a city-centre street. The nearby blocks were rebuilt many times over the twentieth century, and a timber hall of 1813 standing among them holds a thread that would otherwise have been cut.

Registration and designation are separate systems. The registration scheme dates from the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, and it asks the owner to give notice before major alterations rather than to obtain permission for routine work. It was framed for buildings more than 50 years old that are still in daily use, which describes a working temple hall well.

What to look for

The hall follows the hōjō plan. Hōjō originally meant the abbot's own quarters in a Zen monastery, and the layout later became one of the standard forms for a temple's main hall. The priests' quarters, the kuri, run on from the north end of the hall along the same ridge line, so the main hall and the residential wing read as a single building rather than two. The registered floor area for the whole is 182 square metres, single-storeyed and timber-framed.

Outside, the roof is Kirizuma-zukuri with Sangawara-buki pantiles, and a Geya lean-to runs right around all 4 sides. The gable end is the part to stop for. It is filled with kitsuregōshi, a close vertical lattice set behind the bargeboards, and hung with a Gegyo, the carved pendant that covers the exposed end of the ridge purlin. Lattice and pendant together give the gable a face, which is why this elevation appears in the photographs the city and the prefecture both chose to publish.

Inside the inner sanctuary

The Naijin, the inner sanctuary, is ceiled with a fine coffered ceiling: a Gō-tenjō grid with each compartment subdivided by smaller lattice, a treatment that takes far more joinery than a plain coffered ceiling. Across the front of the sanctuary runs an osa-ranma, a Ranma transom whose vertical members are set as close together as the reed of a weaving loom. The name comes from that comparison.

At the back stands the Shumidan, the altar platform, with a row of katōguchi openings along it. These are the cusped, ogee-headed openings familiar from Zen temple architecture, and lining them up in a row across the platform gives the sanctuary its rhythm. Ichinomiya being a weaving city, there is a small pleasure in finding a loom part named in the ceiling of its oldest surviving hall.

Visiting the Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters

Zuihōin is a working temple, not a museum. No regular public opening of the interior is advertised, no admission is charged, and no visiting hours are published. If you hope to see the inner sanctuary, contact the temple in advance and accept that the answer may be no. What is freely available is the exterior, and the east front and the gable are both visible from the street.

Getting there is easy. Meitetsu Ichinomiya Station and JR Owari-Ichinomiya Station sit side by side about 800 metres north of the temple, roughly 15 minutes on foot through the city centre. From Nagoya the ride takes under 15 minutes on either the Meitetsu Nagoya Main Line or the JR Tōkaidō Main Line.

Photographing the Zuihoin Main Hall and Priests' Quarters from the public street is unrestricted. Inside the gate, ask first. Services and funerals are held here, and a hall of this size fills quickly. Since access arrangements at privately held temples change without notice, confirm before travelling a long way.