Enkyoji Temple Tower Gate

A Kamakura Gate in a Small Mino Town

The Two-Storey Gate of Enkyōji (円鏡寺楼門, Enkyōji Rōmon, the temple also written 圓鏡寺), located at Kitagata in Kitagata Town, Motosu District, Gifu Prefecture, was raised in 1296 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 5 April 1909.

Enkyōji is a Shingon temple of special head status, its full name Chikyōzan Enkyōji. Tradition credits its founding to Kūkai in 811 under imperial vow, and in the Eien era of the late 980s it became a prayer temple of Emperor Ichijō. The complex grew large enough to hold sixteen sub-temples along with a goma hall, a honji hall, and a sutra repository. Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu all extended patronage. The volume of art and documents that survives here has earned the temple the local nickname of the Shōsōin of Mino.

The gate stands on the eastern side of the precinct. An inscription on the upper beam records that it was built by a monk named Eison in the fourth year of the Einin era, which corresponds to 1296. The Mongol invasions were two decades past but still fresh in memory, and the appetite for building on this scale in a provincial town says something about the religious mood of the moment.

The Case for Designation

The form is a three-bay, single-entrance rōmon with an irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof and hiwada-buki cypress bark thatching. Kitagata Town's documentation describes it as the second oldest surviving gate of this type in the country, and it counts among the oldest standing buildings in Gifu Prefecture.

Structurally it is pure wayō, the native Japanese manner, without the Zen-influenced or Great Buddha detailing that was spreading through Japanese temple architecture in the same century. That consistency is part of its value. The bracketing on the upper storey is mitesaki, a three-stepped system that pushes the eaves far out from the wall plane; the tails of the projecting rafters are cut vertically at their ends; kentozuka struts fill the intervals between brackets. Every pillar is round and stands on a foundation stone. Note the absence of nose-pieces on the head tie beams and the absence of nageshi tie rails on the lower storey, both deliberate omissions in a building that could easily have carried them.

National protection began on 5 April 1909, when the gate was listed as a specially protected building under the law then in force. The 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties converted that status into the present Important Cultural Property category. A major repair campaign was carried out in 1914.

One measure of the building's standing: when the south gate of Meiji Jingū in Tokyo was being designed in the early twentieth century, this gate in a small Gifu town was taken as the model.

Details to Find on Site

Walk to the gable end first. The barge boards carry inome-gegyo, gable pendants pierced with a heart-shaped opening, and the gable framing itself is inoko-sasu, a triangular arrangement of struts. The eaves run futanoki shigedaruki, doubled and closely spaced, with a finished soffit and curved shirin panels closing the gap between the bracketing and the eave boards.

Climb your eye to the upper storey. A kirime-en veranda runs right around it with a kōran balustrade, and the boards of that veranda are laid with gaps of roughly two centimetres between them. That is not sloppiness. It is drainage, designed in by a carpenter who knew what seven hundred rainy seasons would do to a horizontal timber surface.

The lower storey holds the figures. The central bay has double-leaf board doors; the flanking bays contain a pair of Niō guardian statues, wooden Kongō Rikishi images of Kamakura date and separately designated as Important Cultural Properties in their own right. An interpretive panel beside the gate attributes them to Unkei, but the dates do not support that attribution, so it is best read as a traditional claim rather than a documented one. The statues stand behind protective mesh, which makes clean photography difficult; the bare feet, carved with unusual anatomical attention, are still visible through it.

Inside the lower storey, look for the kōryō beam whose lower edge follows a natural curve, and for the ita-kaerumata, a solid frog-leg strut whose shoulders are cut in a distinctive profile. Both are typical Kamakura work. The bracketing here is futatesaki, two-stepped, and the ceiling is the kumiire type, coffered into the framing.

Stand back at the end. The roof pitch is gentle and the proportion between roof and lower body is unusually well judged, which is the quality that architects of the Meiji period admired and copied.

Visiting Enkyōji

The temple sits in the built-up centre of Kitagata Town, in what was once its gate-front district. The gate stands in the open at the east entrance to the precinct, so it can be seen and photographed at any hour without an appointment. There is no admission charge for the precinct or for approaching the gate.

Passing through the gate on foot is the ordinary way to enter the temple grounds. The upper storey is not open to visitors. The Niō statues are visible through their mesh screens on either side of the passage.

Other designated works are held here, including wooden standing images of Shō Kannon and Fudō Myōō, both nationally designated, along with a substantial group of prefecturally designated paintings. These are not on permanent display, so anyone hoping to see them should contact the temple or the Kitagata Town board of education in advance.

Kitagata is reached by bus from Gifu Station, and the town centre is compact enough to cover on foot. Gifu City and its castle on Mount Kinka lie a short distance east, which makes the gate a workable half-day addition to a Gifu itinerary.