Yoganji Temple Guest Hall

A two-storey annex at the end of the line

Yoganji Temple Guest Hall (陽願寺客殿, Yōganji Kyakuden) is the two-storey Japanese-style annex attached to the west of the Western-style building at Yoganji in Honmachi, Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture; built around 1942, it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 August 2020. It is a timber building with a building area of 71 square metres under a tiled hip-and-gable roof, running north to south, with white plaster walls between exposed posts.

The line of buildings that runs west from the priests' quarters through the audience hall, Goten hall and Western-style building ends here. The temple also calls it the hanare, the annex. Because its plan appears in a temple inventory of 1942, the temple's survey dates it to that time, built just after the Western-style building.

Its role differed from the audience hall and Goten hall, which were made for the head of Hongwanji. According to the survey, this was where the head priest, himself of Hongwanji family lineage, lived day to day and entertained his own guests.

Why it was registered: private space inside a temple

The Yoganji Guest Hall was registered under the criterion of serving as a model of design. The Agency's description places a stair hall at the center of the long side; upstairs to the south is a 10-mat principal room with alcove, shelves and writing bay, opening onto a veranda. North of the stairs are two six-mat rooms on each floor: upstairs a room in the sukiya manner, downstairs a family altar room. The description says the building shows what private space inside a temple looked like.

In a precinct full of formal reception rooms, it is rare for the living and hosting spaces of the head priest's family to survive as a complete building. That the ground-floor north room is a naibutsu room, the family's own shrine for private worship, sums up its character.

The temple's survey notes that the rooms facing the garden are ranked highest, that the finish throughout is of good quality, and that old timber in the sukiya taste was reused as the floorboard of an alcove. It singles the building out as a well-preserved example of Japanese-style domestic architecture from the early Showa war years.

What to look for: the upstairs principal room and the sukiya room

The principal room sits at the south end of the upper floor: ten mats with alcove, staggered shelves and writing bay, and the garden opening beyond the south veranda. Among the single-storey shoin rooms, only this building looks down on the garden from above.

North of the stairs, two six-mat rooms stand on each floor. The upstairs room is in the lighter sukiya style, a counterpart to the correct shoin manner of the principal room. Details such as reused old timber in the alcove floor reflect a Showa sukiya taste for materials with a history.

From outside, the hip-and-gable roof and white upper storey rise above the single-storey Goten roof. The vertical bamboo cladding on the lower west wall of the Goten hall is read by the temple's survey as a screen against views from this annex.

Visiting the Yoganji Guest Hall

The Yoganji Guest Hall is not on the route of either the regular paid visit or the reserved special visit. It is the private space of the head priest's household, and you should assume the interior is not open.

You can see its two-storey form behind the Western-style building when the paid visit takes you out onto the Goten hall's veranda or garden side. For questions about access to the interior, ask the temple office, open 9:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.