Kōran

What a kōran is

A kōran is a railing set along the outer edge of a veranda or a bridge. On a shrine or temple building it runs round the edge of the plank floor; on a bridge it stands to either side of the roadway.

Records name the type. The main hall of Kasuga Shrine in Oita Prefecture, from the late Edo period, is described as a three-bay Kirizuma-zukuri hall with a one-bay front canopy roofed in copper, ringed by a plank veranda with a railing framed like bracketing. The subsidiary Itsukushima Shrine in the same precinct is described as having a plank veranda with a knobbed railing and two wooden steps at the front.

The knobs are onion-shaped finials set on the posts, and a railing carrying them is named for them. The other kind is assembled from smaller members in the manner of a bracket set.

Bell towers use them too. The bell tower at Tokujuji in Aichi Prefecture, built in 1934, has a bracketed base carrying a veranda with a knobbed railing; the one at Shounji, from the late Meiji period, is ringed by the same kind of veranda, with round columns tied at the head, three-block brackets, Kaerumata between them and a Gō-tenjō above.

Beyond temples and shrines

Bridge parapets are recorded with the same word. Yabakei Bridge in Oita Prefecture, built in 1923, is entered simply as an eight-arch stone bridge, 115.7 metres long and 4.5 metres wide, with railings.

Townhouses and restaurants borrowed the form for their upper windows. Shinkaiya in Tokyo, from the early Showa period, is described as tall in build, with a projecting lattice at ground level, cantilevered eaves above, and a railing of pierced boards at the upper windows. The restaurant wing of Mameshin in Shiga Prefecture, built in 1918, is described as fitting a railing in this manner to the windows of its large upstairs room.

That last phrasing matters. A record may name the part itself or say only that a handrail was made in its manner, and the difference is worth preserving rather than flattening into a single term.