Yoganji Temple Goten Hall

A raised dais for the head of Hongwanji

Yoganji Temple Goten Hall (陽願寺御殿, Yōganji Goten) is the reception wing west of the audience hall at Yoganji in Honmachi, Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture; completed around 1902, it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 August 2020. It is a single-storey timber building with a building area of 169 square metres, its tiled gabled roof swelling gently upward at the center, over white plaster walls framed by exposed posts.

Goten means a palace-like suite of rooms, and here it names the rooms where the head of Hongwanji received a few people in private. The audience hall was the formal stage for meeting many priests and followers; the Goten hall was the more intimate one. The temple's survey reads the audience hall as a recreation of the Ko-no-ma at Nishi Hongwanji and the Goten hall as a recreation of its White Shoin.

The national database dates the building to around 1902. The temple's survey notes that it already appears on an Edo-period plan of the precinct and places the start of construction in the late Edo period.

Why it was registered: fine rooms for a head priest's visit

The Yoganji Goten Hall was registered under the criterion of serving as a model of design. The Agency's description gives a 10-mat reception room to the west and a 10-mat anteroom to the east, a large alcove on the west wall of the reception room, a tatami veranda along the south with an outer veranda and earth-floored edge beyond, and, north of the reception room, a chamber whose inner six mats form a raised dais with alcove, shelves and a writing bay. It calls the whole a refined space designed for receiving the head of the mother temple.

The dais is the heart of it. Six mats raised one step on a lacquered edge beam, with a decorative alcove, staggered shelves and a projecting writing desk: in shoin-style architecture this is the highest seat in the house, and it was where the head of Hongwanji sat. The temple's survey records an L-shaped plan of three rooms, a bamboo comb-tooth transom between anteroom and reception room, and lacquered batten ceilings.

The inner veranda is a tatami corridor one bay wide, which the temple calls the saya, the sheath. Beside the reception room it holds storage behind painted cedar doors. Beyond it runs the outer veranda, closed by storm shutters. From the veranda in front of the anteroom, a roofed sloping corridor climbs to the back of the main hall.

What to look for: the garden from the dais

What the temple's survey calls fresh and open is the placement of the garden straight in front of the dais. The Goten garden fills the space between this wing and the back of the main hall, its center dug lower so that the whole garden can be seen from the rooms. A pond edged with flat stones lies in the middle.

Sit on the mats and lower your eye level. Past the sunken garden you see the back of the main hall's great roof, and the view as the head of Hongwanji saw it falls into place. The maples color in autumn, and the temple has held seasonal illuminations.

There is detail outside too. Along the west side facing the guest hall, the lower wall is clad in bamboo laid vertically, which the temple's survey reads as a screen against views from the annex.

Visiting the Yoganji Goten Hall

The rooms of the Yoganji Goten Hall and its garden are shown on the temple's paid visits on weekends and holidays from April through December. On the reserved special visit, time is set aside to take matcha and sweets in the Goten rooms while looking out at the garden.

The garden is viewed from the rooms and veranda; you cannot walk down into it. Some rooms may be in use on event days, so check the temple's website before you go.