Fukusenbo Bell Tower

Nine and a Half Square Metres of Dense Carpentry

Fukusenbo Shoro (福泉坊鐘楼, also written Fukusen-bo Shōrō), the bell tower of a Jodo Shinshu Honganji-ha temple in the Yoshida district of Akitakata City, Hiroshima Prefecture, was built in 1954 and entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 December 2014.

It stands to the west of the precinct, immediately beside the main hall. The plan is one bay square, the frame is open on all four sides in the fukihanachi manner, and the roof is an irimoya hip-and-gable form in sangawara pantiles. Total area: 9.4 square metres.

That figure is worth holding on to. The bell tower occupies about one forty-third of the ground taken by the main hall. It is by a wide margin the smallest of the four registered structures at Fukusenbo, and by an equally wide margin the one with the most carpentry packed into each square metre.

One point in the national record needs flagging. The database gives the period as Edo in its era field while recording the year as Showa 29, that is 1954, in the fields for date and Western year. The two do not agree. Since the specific date fields concur with each other, 1954 is the reading followed here, but the discrepancy is unresolved and anyone relying on the date for research should raise it with the Akitakata City Board of Education.

How the Frame Is Put Together

Start at the ground. The tower sits on a podium of cut stone, and on top of that podium are stone bases, soban, one under each column. Raising a timber frame clear of the earth on worked stone is the standard answer to the standard problem: timber in contact with damp ground rots, and a bell tower has no walls to shed water away from its feet.

Four round columns rise from those bases, and they do not rise vertically. All four lean inward toward the top in an arrangement called shiho-korobi, splayed on all four sides. The effect is partly structural, since a splayed frame resists lateral movement better than a straight one, and partly visual, because the slight taper reads as stability. A bell tower needs both. Ringing a temple bell means swinging a heavy beam against a mass of bronze, and the frame absorbs that impact repeatedly over decades.

The columns are tied by koshinuki at waist height and kashiranuki at the head, penetrating tie beams that pass through the posts rather than butting against them, and the assembly is closed off above by a daiwa, a continuous plate running around the top of the frame. The daiwa matters because of what sits on it.

What sits on it is degumi bracketing with odaruki, arranged as tsumegumi. Unpacking those three terms is the whole point of looking at this building. Degumi is a bracket complex that steps out one stage to carry the eaves further from the wall line. Odaruki are tail rafters, angled levers running back into the frame so that the weight of the projecting eaves is counterbalanced rather than merely cantilevered. Tsumegumi means the bracket sets are placed continuously along the plate, packed side by side, instead of appearing only above the columns.

Continuous bracketing arrived in Japan with the Zen-style architecture of the Kamakura period and stayed as a marker of high-grade construction. On a structure of 9.4 square metres it is close to extravagant, because the number of brackets required does not fall in proportion to the size of the building. The registration citation describes the tower as having a well-developed vocabulary of bracketing and fine carved detail, and says it gives a Jodo Shinshu temple compound its characteristic form.

A Postwar Sequence

Set the dates of the four registered structures side by side and a pattern emerges.

The gate was built in 1830 and the priests' quarters in the same late Edo decades. Then nothing for more than a century. The main hall went up in 1948, and this bell tower in 1954. Two of the four buildings at Fukusenbo date from the nine years after the Pacific War ended.

Temple bells have their own history in those years. Under Japan's metal requisition orders of the early 1940s, bronze bells were collected from temples across the country and melted down for war material, and the decade after 1945 saw widespread recasting of bells and rebuilding of the structures that housed them. The national record for Fukusenbo does not state why its bell tower was built in 1954, so the connection cannot be asserted for this temple in particular. The general context is documented, and the date sits squarely within it.

What can be said is that a community which had just replaced its main hall in 1948 chose, six years later, to put up a bell tower with continuous bracketing and tail rafters on a footprint smaller than a modest bedroom. The choice was not the economical one.

Visiting Fukusenbo

Fukusenbo is an active parish temple, not a managed visitor site. No admission is charged, there is no ticket desk, and no opening hours are published.

The bell tower is open on all four sides, which makes it the easiest of the four structures to study once you are inside the precinct. The precinct can generally be entered during daylight. Stand close and look up into the underside of the eaves, since the bracketing and tail rafters are only legible from directly beneath, and the fukihanachi construction means nothing blocks the view. Do not ring the bell. Sounding a temple bell is a liturgical act with its own timing, and visitors should leave it to the temple.

Photography of the exterior from within the precinct is ordinarily unproblematic. Hold off when a service or funeral is under way. Interior access to the main hall requires arranging with the temple office in advance, and the priests' quarters are a private residence and closed to visitors.

The Yoshida bus stop is about 120 metres from the temple, a two-minute walk, with the Akitakata City Hall stop slightly further. Buses reach Yoshida from Hiroshima Bus Center in around an hour and twenty-five minutes and from JR Kabe Station in about fifty minutes. Yoshidaguchi, the nearest station on the JR Geibi Line, is unstaffed and 3.8 kilometres away, so rail travellers usually continue to Mukaihara and take a taxi for fifteen to twenty minutes. Drivers should exit the Chugoku Expressway at Takada, about twenty minutes out.

The ruins of Koriyama Castle and the Akitakata City Museum of History and Folklore lie within walking distance and pair naturally with a visit to the temple.