Fukudenji Temple Main Gate

Two and a half metres of carved zelkova

Fukudenji Temple Main Gate (福田寺山門, Fukudenji Sanmon) is a four-legged temple gate of 1822 in Kamiagawa, Iyo, Ehime Prefecture, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 26 December 2005.

The gate is small. Its frontage measures 2.8 metres, which is barely wider than a domestic doorway once the posts are counted in, and the national register classifies it not as a building but as a structure of another kind. Everything else about it is generous.

It is a shikyakumon, the type in which a pair of round main posts carries the ridge and four squared subsidiary posts brace them fore and aft. The roof is Kirizuma-zukuri with Hongawarabuki tiling, and the eaves are doubled, with rafters set close together in the manner called futanoki shigedaruki. The whole frame is zelkova, left bare: no lacquer, no paint, no colour but the grain.

Note where it stands. Fukudenji Temple Main Gate sits south of the main hall and faces east, while the hall it serves faces south. The approach therefore turns. You come in through the gate heading west, then swing north up the long narrow precinct toward the hall.

Why the gate was registered

The register cites the gate as a model of its type of design, and the case rests on ornament. Ehime Prefecture's cultural properties division describes the carving and the drawn patterning as characteristic of the closing decades of the Edo period, which is precisely what a dated example is useful for.

The date is firm. Iyo City states that the year of construction is judged from the Munafuda, the ridge tag fixed inside the roof when a Japanese building is raised. That gives 1822, the fifth year of the Bunsei era. A carved gate with a documented year is a fixed point against which undated work in the region can be measured.

Fukudenji belongs to the Myōshinji branch of the Rinzai school and was established on this site in 1667 under the patronage of the Katō house of the Ōzu domain. The gate came a century and a half into that history, when the temple was long settled and could afford display.

What to look at

Stand under the eaves and look up at the bracketing. Each post carries Mitsudo-gumi, a three-block set, and each set is finished with a sanehijiki, a short arm laid along the top that lengthens the bearing and gives the cluster its stepped profile. Between the brackets, in the position called nakazonae, sits a Kaerumata, the frog-leg strut whose splayed outline is one of the oldest decorative forms in Japanese carpentry.

Turn to either gable end. The Kōryō arches across, and above it a Taiheizuka rises to the ridge, flanked by oigata, the pair of wing-shaped panels that steady the strut and, on this gate, carry waves. Wave patterns on a gable, spirals on the beam and on the kibana where the tie beams break through the posts, further carving on the small corbels: the vocabulary is dense for a gate this size.

Then walk on to the main hall and look again. That building, 40 metres north, has no bracketing and no carving at all. The same temple commissioned both. The gate is where a nineteenth-century Zen community chose to spend its ornament, and the hall is where it chose not to. Reading Fukudenji Temple Main Gate against the plainness behind it is the most rewarding ten minutes on the site.

Bare zelkova ages toward silver-grey, and low sun rakes across the carving in a way that midday light flattens. Early morning suits the east-facing front.

Visiting

Of the three registered buildings at Fukudenji, the gate is the one that can actually be examined, because visitors pass under it. Fukudenji Temple Main Gate stands in the open precinct and can be viewed and photographed from either side at any reasonable hour. There is no admission charge and no ticket office.

That said, Fukudenji is a parish temple with an active cemetery rather than a visitor attraction. Funerals and memorial services take place regularly. Park considerately, keep away from services, and do not photograph people or building interiors without permission.

Getting there: Iyo-shi Station on the JR Yosan Line is about 1.6 kilometres to the northwest, some 25 minutes on foot, and Gunchūkō Station on the Iyotetsu Gunchū Line is about 2 kilometres away. Drivers coming from Matsuyama Airport should allow around 9 kilometres. Enquiries about the registered structures go to the Social Education Division of the Iyo City Board of Education, 089-982-1111, weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.