Kaitai shūri

What kaitai shūri is

Kaitai shūri is a repair in which a building is taken apart member by member, the damaged parts treated, and the whole reassembled. Unlike a repair confined to the roof or the walls, it reaches the frame and everything normally hidden within it.

The process often establishes the date of a building. The gate at Tofukuji in Kyoto, a National Treasure, is described by Cultural Heritage Online as having yielded inked inscriptions during the dismantling repair of 1969 to 1977, which showed that the tiling and the upper storey were being worked on until about 1405 to 1413.

Such inscriptions are written in ink on the timbers themselves, usually where assembly hides them. They cannot be read without taking the building apart, so repair becomes the occasion for research.

The city of Ojiya records that during the major dismantling repair of 1954 at the Amida hall of Uonuma Shrine in Niigata Prefecture, the characters for 1563 were found on a bracket, allowing the building to be dated to that year or, by the zodiac reckoning, to 1565.

Restoration as part of the work

Such repairs often restore later alterations to an earlier state. The Ojiya record notes that the hall was renamed a portable-shrine store at the separation of Shinbutsu-shūgō in the early Meiji period, later received an Amida triad again, and had its original name restored at the repair. Even the name went back.

Other evidence for dating exists, such as a Munafuda or an inscribed Onigawara, but those sit in fixed places at the ridge or the roof. Inscriptions found during a dismantling repair may come from any member, so the range of information is wider.

When writing, establish which source a date rests on. Where it came from a repair, the record usually gives both the year of the repair and the date it revealed.