Seven-Storied Pagoda

A Granite Pagoda on the Site of a Lost Dazaifu Temple

On a low hill in the Suzaku district of Dazaifu, about one kilometer south of the ruins of the ancient government headquarters that once administered all of Kyushu, a granite pagoda just over three meters tall stands among ordinary houses. It is known simply as the Shichijūnotō, the "seven-storied tower," and it marks the spot where a temple called Hannya-ji stood more than a thousand years ago.

The pagoda is built entirely of stone. Seven flat roof-stones, each carved to suggest the eaves of a wooden building, are stacked in diminishing tiers above a shaft and a base, reaching a total height of 3.35 meters. Nothing about it is large by the standards of Japan's famous timber pagodas, but it is the oldest layered pagoda surviving in the city, and the only structure left standing on a temple site that archaeology has otherwise reduced to buried foundations.

The Temple Beneath the Houses

Hannya-ji belongs to the earliest layer of Dazaifu's history. According to tradition the temple was founded in 654, during the reign of Emperor Kōtoku, by Soga no Himuka, who held the post of governor-general of the Dazai office. The temple is said to have been built as a prayer for the emperor's recovery from illness. In the Nara period it was moved onto the gridded hillside within the planned city of Dazaifu, and for a time only two temples stood inside that grid: Kanzeon-ji and Hannya-ji, both connected to the imperial house.

Excavations have recovered the shape of the vanished temple. The base of its main pagoda measured 11.9 meters on each side, with roof tiles stacked along the edges of the platform. The tiles that came out of the ground match the types used in the eighth century at the Dazaifu government offices and the Kōrokan reception hall, which ties the temple firmly to the official world of the western capital. Post holes from the late seventh century and the stone platform of the pagoda from the eighth century have both been identified on the slope.

The temple itself is long gone. What remains is the later stone pagoda, raised on the eastern edge of the precinct in the thirteenth century, generations after the wooden buildings had disappeared.

Why It Is Protected

The Shichijūnotō was designated an Important Cultural Property in the architecture category on March 20, 1954. Stone pagodas of this height and age are uncommon in northern Kyushu, and this one is dated to the late Kamakura period on the basis of its proportions and carving. It was dismantled and conserved in 1976, which is part of why the seven tiers remain so well aligned today.

Its value lies partly in where it sits. A designated piece of medieval stonework standing on the ground of an early temple links two widely separated chapters of the same place: the seventh-century foundation recorded in tradition, and the thirteenth-century devotion that left this tower behind. For visitors interested in how Dazaifu changed across six centuries, the pagoda is a fixed point that both periods touch.

What to Look For

Walk around the pagoda and read the four faces of the shaft. Each carries a Sanskrit seed-syllable, the kind of single character used in esoteric Buddhism to stand in for a deity. Together the four represent the Buddhas of the four directions in the Diamond World mandala, a scheme in which a central Buddha is surrounded by four others, one to each compass point. Carving these syllables turned a simple stone shaft into a representation of that cosmic diagram.

Look next at the seven roof-stones. The mason cut each one to mimic the curve and overhang of a wooden temple roof, then graded them so that each tier is slightly smaller than the one below. The granite has weathered to a pale grey, and lichen has settled into the carved lines, which makes the seed-syllables easier to read in raking morning or late-afternoon light than at noon.

The setting itself is worth a moment. From the hill the streets of modern Dazaifu spread out below, and it is not hard to understand why a temple was placed here, on high ground with a clear view over the city that the court had laid out on the plain.

Getting There and Nearby Sites

The pagoda stands in a residential neighborhood at Suzaku 2-chome and can be viewed at any time without charge. The closest railway station is Nishitetsu Futsukaichi, from which the hill of the former Hannya-ji precinct lies a short walk to the east. Because the surrounding land is now private housing, visitors are asked to keep to the public lane around the monument.

The pagoda sits within a dense cluster of major sites. About a kilometer north are the ruins of the Dazaifu government complex, a broad lawn dotted with stone column bases that marks the center of the old administration. Close by stands Kanzeon-ji, the other temple that once shared the inner grid, which keeps a National Treasure bronze bell and a hall of large Buddhist sculptures. Farther east are Dazaifu Tenmangu, the shrine to the scholar Sugawara no Michizane, and the Kyushu National Museum. All of these belong to the same Japan Heritage story, "The Ancient Capital of the West," which treats Dazaifu as Japan's gateway to the continent.