Hiyoshi Shrine Three-Story Pagoda

A Buddhist Pagoda Standing in a Shinto Precinct

Hiyoshi Shrine Three-Storied Pagoda (日吉神社三重塔, Hiyoshi-jinja Sanjunoto, also written Hiyoshi-jinja Sanju-no-to) stands in the town of Godo in Anpachi District, Gifu Prefecture, dates to the late Muromachi period, and was designated an Important Cultural Property on 17 April 1914.

A Buddhist pagoda inside the grounds of a Shinto shrine surprises many visitors. In Japan before 1868, the arrangement was ordinary. Buddhist and Shinto worship shared precincts, clergy, and buildings under a system now called shinbutsu shugo. The Meiji government separated the two by decree in 1868, and most such pagodas were dismantled, sold, or moved. This one stayed where it was built.

The structure measures three bays on each side and rises through three roofed stories to a bronze finial, reaching 24.6 meters overall. Every roof is laid in cypress bark. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as one structure, dating it to the late Muromachi period between 1467 and 1572, under designation number 00640.

Hiyoshi Shrine itself traces its founding to 817, when the monk Saicho, posthumously titled Dengyo Daishi, is said to have brought the deity of Hiyoshi Taisha at Sakamoto near Lake Biwa to this site at the request of a local landholder, Anpachi no Taifu Yasutsugu. The shrine served as the tutelary sanctuary of Hirano-no-sho, an estate held by Enryakuji, the Tendai temple on Mount Hiei.

The Case for Designation

National protection came in 1914, the third year of the Taisho era, which places this among the earlier building designations in Gifu Prefecture. Two things carried the argument.

The first is timber proportion. Japanese carpenters use the term kiwari for the system of ratios that governs member sizes throughout a building. The pagoda's kiwari is generous, with substantial columns and bracket members, and the balance holds from the base through the finial. Prefectural documentation describes it as a well-proportioned work of the first rank.

The second is the completeness of its bracketing. Each of the three stories carries a full wayo mitesaki arrangement, meaning three stepped bracket tiers in the native Japanese manner, together with curved fan supports and a boarded eave ceiling. Building all three stories to this specification, rather than simplifying the upper levels as smaller pagodas often do, required both money and skilled labor.

Documentary evidence about the construction date is mixed. A ridge plaque records a repair carried out in 1585 by Inaba Ittetsu, the warlord who held Sogi Castle. Local tradition holds that Saito Toshitsuna erected the pagoda during the Eisho era, which ran from 1504 to 1521. The Agency for Cultural Affairs does not adopt either date, listing the period as late Muromachi, 1467 to 1572, and treating the founding attribution as tradition rather than record.

What to Look For on the Ground

Approach along the main path, which runs straight between rows of stone lanterns from the outer torii gate. The pagoda comes into view to one side, its cypress-bark roofs stacked in three receding tiers.

Start with the eaves. Each story uses double-tier closely spaced rafters, futanoki shigedaruki, so that the underside of every eave reads as a dense field of parallel timbers. Between the eave and the wall run curved fan-shaped boards called shirin, and above them a flat boarded ceiling closes the space. The tail rafters project with a distinct upward curve, and their ends are thickened before being cut off vertically, a detail that adds visible weight at the eave line.

Look next at the horizontal band above the columns. A massive daiwa, a broad head-plate, runs around the building, and the bracket complexes sit on top of it. In the spaces between brackets the carpenters alternated two filler types: short strut blocks called kentozuka and shaped struts called minozuka, placed as the rhythm of each face required rather than in rigid repetition. The projecting ends of the tie-beams are carved into spiral-patterned nosings.

One asymmetry rewards attention. Only the first story carries nageshi, the horizontal boards applied across the column faces. The upper two stories omit them. Balustrades appear on the second story but not the third.

Inside the pagoda sits an image of Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic Buddha of the Shingon and Tendai traditions. In the shrine's main sanctuary is an Eleven-Headed Kannon. The precinct also holds a treasury with two more nationally designated Important Cultural Properties, seated images of the Eleven-Headed Kannon and of Jizo Bosatsu, and in front of the main sanctuary stands a hundred-and-eight lamp stand registered as a prefectural folk cultural property.

The grounds are open without charge and the pagoda may be viewed and photographed from outside at any time. The interior is not open to visitors. The annual festival, known as the Godo Sanno Matsuri, falls on 3 and 4 May; the dawn procession, escorted by pine torches, has given it the local name of the Godo fire festival. Hirogodo Station on the Yoro Railway is the nearest rail access, about a fifteen-minute walk away. Ogaki lies roughly twenty minutes by car.