Yoganji Temple Western-Style Building

A small Western room at the end of the shoin wing

Yoganji Temple Western-Style Building (陽願寺洋館, Yōganji Yōkan) is the small Western-style timber building extending west from the south veranda of the Goten hall at Yoganji in Honmachi, Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture; built around 1934, it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 August 2020. It is a single-storey building with a building area of 45 square metres, under a hipped roof of brick-red pantiles chosen to look like Western tiles.

At the end of a line of Japanese reception rooms built for the head of Hongwanji, two Western rooms were added. The temple's survey links them to the marriage in 1934 of the fifteenth head priest, who had succeeded after his father's sudden death. That father, the fourteenth head priest, had studied in Paris for eight and a half years from 1882 as a Hongwanji scholar, and the survey suggests his experience may have encouraged the idea of a Western room.

The temple's survey measures the building at 10.2 metres by 6.12 metres, including the corridor. The walls are fully plastered, with a scored wash-finish dado below and a coarse thrown finish above, rendered right up to the eaves.

Why it was registered: a quiet reception room

The Yoganji Western-Style Building was registered under the criterion of serving as a model of design. The Agency's description notes a central reception room whose south side is a bay window of trapezoidal plan with a door to the garden, a study to the west, plaster ceilings with a central ornament in both rooms, a corridor along the north, and a lavatory between this building and the Goten hall. It calls the whole a reception space of restrained design.

The temple's survey adds that the reception room absorbs an octagonal, corner-cut bay into the room, that the ceiling light fittings appear to be original, and that construction records survive in the temple, so the building's history can be traced. It ranks it as a well-preserved early Showa Western-style building. Walking along the veranda from the shoin rooms, the floor changes from tatami to boards and the ceiling from battens to plaster, and you know you have reached the reception room of a Showa-era head priest.

What to look for: the bay window and the ceiling rose

The reception room has a board floor about the size of eight tatami mats. Light comes in through the bay window pushing out toward the garden on the south, and a door lets you step straight outside. From the garden, the window section projects as a polygon from the white wall, the only Western elevation among the temple's Japanese buildings.

Look up. The flat plaster ceiling is edged with moulding, and a light hangs from a round ceiling rose at its center. The study is finished the same way. The corridor windows are top-hinged and push outward, and their original latches remain. That this small building keeps even its window hardware is much of its appeal.

Visiting the Yoganji Western-Style Building

You can see inside the Yoganji Western-Style Building on the temple's paid visits, held on weekends and holidays from April through December, as part of the route through from the Goten hall. It is also on the reserved special visit.

For the exterior, look from the Goten garden side. The projecting bay and red roof come into view when you turn west on the Goten hall's veranda.