Mt. Kinrei Ryugenji Main Hall

Rebuilt After Everything Burned

The Main Hall of Kinreizan Ryūgenji (金嶺山龍源寺本堂, Kinreizan Ryūgenji Hondō) is a large thatched Sōtō Zen temple hall at Yashima in Yurihonjō City, Akita Prefecture, rebuilt in 1880 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2004.

The rebuilding date carries the story. In 1868, during the Boshin War, Yashima domain sided with the imperial cause and was invaded by a neighbouring domain. Every building at Ryūgenji burned. What visitors see today was raised from nothing by the abbot and the parish in the years that followed, and the scale of what they managed is the first thing to register when you come through the gate.

The hall measures 24 metres along the ridge and 16 metres across, covering 441 square metres. One storey, timber frame, thatched roof. For a rural temple in the Meiji period, in a district that had just been through a war, this was an enormous undertaking.

Ryūgenji belongs to the Sōtō school of Zen, which traces itself to Dōgen and looks to two head temples, Eiheiji in Fukui and Sōjiji in Yokohama. The principal image is Shakyamuni.

The Roof, and a Carpenter Who Signed His Work

Thatch on this scale is rare, and it is the reason people photograph the building. A roof 24 metres long has to carry the weight of Akita snow across a 16-metre span without the walls being driven outward, and the framing inside is doing serious structural work that the smooth exterior conceals entirely.

Look at the proportions rather than the size. The eaves sit relatively low for a hall of this width, which keeps the mass from looming. Local descriptions make the point that a building this large ought to feel imposing and somehow does not.

At the front, set east of the centre line rather than symmetrically, a kōhai canopy projects over the entrance. It is roofed in the hipped-and-gabled irimoya form, with a nokikarahafu above it, the undulating cusped gable whose curve is one of the more distinctive shapes in Japanese carpentry. On the left, a corridor runs off to the ihaidō, the hall where memorial tablets for the dead of the parish are kept.

The name of the master carpenter survives. A munafuda, the wooden tag inscribed at the raising of the ridge and left in the roof space, records Sasaki Mitsunobu. Attributions of this kind are uncommon for provincial buildings of the period, and it is worth pausing on the fact that a carpenter working in a small Akita town in 1880 can still be named.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the rebuilding as 1880. A local heritage guide published for Yashima states that the hall was completed and consecrated in 1882. The two accounts may be describing different points in the same process, and readers should treat the earlier date as the official record.

A Family Exiled from Takamatsu

The temple was founded in 1623 by Utechi Mitsutaka and his son Mitsuhisa, one of the minor warrior houses of the Yuri district, who had been granted three thousand koku at Yashima and came north from Hitachi Province. They brought a priest, Hakuhō Kōchin, with them; the temple counts Hakuhō's own teacher as its founding abbot and Hakuhō himself as the second.

The Utechi line failed for want of an heir, and in 1640 the shogunate delivered Ryūgenji a very different patron. Ikoma Takatoshi, fourth lord of Takamatsu in Sanuki with a domain of 173,000 koku, had been stripped of his lands after a violent internal feud among his retainers, and he was reassigned to Yashima at ten thousand koku. Ryūgenji became the Ikoma family temple, and in time the administrative head temple for the Sōtō school across this part of Dewa.

Being an Ikoma temple had consequences for how the place was rebuilt after 1868. The precinct runs to roughly six thousand tsubo including the graveyard, and the rebuilding followed the plan of a house that had once governed a western province.

One postscript. In 2016 the temple returned a suit of armour worn by Ikoma Chikamasa, the first lord of the line, to Kōkenji in Takamatsu, the family's temple in Sanuki. The armour had come north with the household in 1640 and passed to Ryūgenji from the Ikoma family in 1869. It went home after 376 years.

Visiting Ryūgenji

Ryūgenji sits about fifteen minutes on foot from Yashima Station, the terminus of the Yuri Kōgen Railway's Chōkai Sanroku Line, a small local railway that runs south from Ugo-Honjō through rice country toward Mount Chōkai. The walk itself is pleasant and the station is tiny.

This is an active temple with a resident priest and a working parish, and the main hall is used for funerals, memorial services, and the annual observances of the Buddhist calendar. The precinct can be entered and the exterior of the hall viewed without a fee. Interior access is not a standing arrangement; if you want to see inside, contact the temple in advance and be prepared for the answer to depend on the day. The same applies to photography beyond general views of the grounds.

The main hall is not the only building worth walking around. The precinct also holds the Ikoma family mortuary shrine, a Kannon hall associated with the Utechi founders, a founder's hall, and a parish building called Kinryūkaku. Old cedars stand around the hall on several sides, and in summer the temple holds Obon observances in mid-August.

The temple marked four hundred years since its founding in 2023. Details of hours and access can change; check with the temple or the Yurihonjō tourism association before making a long trip.