Kokokuzan Tokushoji Kuri

The Building Where the Temple Actually Lives

Kokokuzan Tokushoji Kuri (興國山徳昌寺庫裡, also written Kōkokuzan Tokushō-ji Kuri) is the priests' quarters and kitchen building of a Soto Zen temple in Tajima, Minamiaizu Town, Fukushima Prefecture, completed in 1820 and entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties in 2001.

A kuri is the domestic half of a Japanese temple. Meals are cooked there, the resident priest and his family sleep there, parishioners arrive there to arrange a funeral or hand over an offering, and the day-to-day business of a parish gets done there. Visitors tend to photograph main halls and walk past kuri without a second look, which is a pity, because the kuri usually carries more information about how a temple actually worked.

This one sits immediately northwest of the main hall and predates it by twenty-four years. The temple traces its origins to 1435, when the Nagauma family, who ruled southern Aizu from Shigiyama Castle, established it as their mortuary temple with a priest named Tsukaku as first abbot. The Nagauma were gone by 1590. The temple carried on, and by the early nineteenth century it needed a new residential wing.

The building is a single timber structure of one storey, roofed in copper sheet, with a footprint of 297 square metres. That is only thirty square metres less than the main hall, which gives some sense of the scale of the household it supported.

A Date Written on the Timber

Most Edo-period buildings in rural Japan cannot be dated precisely. Records burn, temples reorganise their archives, and oral tradition drifts. The kuri at Tokushoji is an exception, and the reason is worth explaining.

Carpenters of the period frequently wrote on structural members in ink, using a brush directly on the wood before assembly. These bokusho inscriptions might record a date, the name of a carpenter, a donor, or simply an instruction about where the piece belonged. Once the frame was up, the writing was hidden inside the building. Survey teams find them during repairs or by crawling into roof spaces. At Tokushoji, inscriptions on the members establish that the kuri was raised in the third year of the Bunsei era, 1820. The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites the timber inscriptions directly as the basis for that date, which puts it on firmer ground than most buildings of its kind.

The roof is the feature most likely to catch a visitor's eye. The ridge runs north to south. At the southern end the roof is treated as irimoya, a hipped form with a small gable above; at the northern end it is kirizuma, a plain gable. Two different roof types on one ridge is not a mistake or a later alteration. It reflects the building's two functions: the south end faces the main hall and the formal side of temple life, the north end faces the approach and the working entrance.

Registration came on 24 April 2001, with public notice on 15 May, in the twenty-eighth round. The register number is 07-0050 and the criterion applied was that the building is a model of design.

Farmhouse Plan, Temple Face

Step through the entrance at the north end and the layout will feel familiar to anyone who has visited a preserved farmhouse in the Tohoku region. The plan follows the six-room grid known as roomadori, an arrangement of two rows of three rooms that spread through rural Japan during the Edo period. The northern portion is doma, an earth-floored working area where the cooking happened and where visitors in outdoor footwear could stand.

The southern rooms tell a different story. Here the builders placed a proper zashiki with a tokonoma alcove and staggered shelving, the formal fittings a farmhouse of the same plan would rarely carry to this standard. This is the room where a temple receives people who matter, and the quality of the joinery reflects that.

The exterior departs from farmhouse convention more visibly. The north gable end, the side you approach from, has been made deliberately large, and a tall pent roof runs around the building beneath the main eaves. The effect raises the apparent height of the entrance front and signals, before anyone steps inside, that this is not an ordinary dwelling. Local architectural surveys read the gesture as the kuri borrowing a little of the main hall's formality.

One inconsistency between sources deserves mention. Signboards installed by the town board of education describe the building as hirairi, entered from the long side beneath the eaves. The national database describes the entrance as being on the north gable end, which would make it tsumairi. Because the same national record establishes the north-south ridge, the gable-end reading is the one this article follows, and readers comparing sources on site should expect the discrepancy.

The kuri remains in use as a residence and parish office. It is not open for interior viewing, and the courteous approach is to look at the exterior from the grounds. Visitors wanting to know more can telephone the temple on 0241-62-0255. The grounds themselves are open without charge, roughly five minutes by car from Aizu-Tajima Station on the Aizu Railway, with parking on site. Exterior photography is generally accepted; pointing a lens through a window of a family home is not.

Tokushoji is the fifteenth stop on the Gokurairi thirty-three Kannon pilgrimage through the Okuaizu mountains. If you are in Tajima between 22 and 24 July, the Aizu-Tajima Gion Festival takes over the streets below the temple, and the bridal procession on the morning of the twenty-third draws photographers from across the prefecture.