Fukusenbo Sanmon Gate

A Gate of 1830, Moved and Standing

Fukusenbo Sanmon (福泉坊山門, also written Fukusen-bo Sanmon), the gate of a Jodo Shinshu Honganji-ha temple in the Yoshida district of Akitakata City, Hiroshima Prefecture, was built in 1830 and entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 December 2014.

It is a small building by any measure. The opening spans 2.4 metres, the frame is timber, and the gable roof carries sangawara pantiles. In the national register it appears not as a building but under the heading of other structures, the same category used for the temple's bell tower.

Size is not the point. This gate stands to the west of the main hall's front, which makes it the first thing anyone sees on arriving and the only one of the four registered structures at Fukusenbo that announces itself from the road. Everything carved into it was carved with that in mind.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the year of construction as Bunsei 13, corresponding to 1830, and notes that the gate was relocated in 2004. The record does not state where it stood before the move, so the relocation is best treated as a documented event whose details remain to be filled in.

The Yakuimon Form and What It Signals

The gate is a yakuimon of a single bay. Understanding that phrase unlocks most of what there is to see.

A yakuimon rests on two substantial front pillars with a pair of slighter posts behind them, and the roof ridge sits forward of centre rather than over the middle of the plan. The result is an asymmetrical profile: a long slope facing the approach, a shorter one behind. Compare it with the shikyakumon, the four-legged gate, where four subsidiary posts stand symmetrically and the ridge runs down the centre. The two types belong to different registers. Shikyakumon carry more formality and appear at the front of major halls; the yakuimon developed as the gate of residences and of temples operating at a domestic scale, and it reads as dignified without being grand.

For a parish temple in a country town, the yakuimon is the appropriate choice, and Fukusenbo's builders then spent their effort on ornament rather than on scale.

The structure above the opening deserves attention. Projecting beams called odaru carry sets of three-block brackets, mitsudo, and these in turn support the purlin and a koryo, a beam given a gentle upward curve along its lower edge. Stacking brackets on a projecting beam in a gate of 2.4 metres is generous construction. The eaves are futanoki shigedaruki, double-tier eaves with closely spaced rafters, a treatment associated with buildings of higher rank. Seeing it on a gate this small tells you the carpenter was not economising.

The gate was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, as were the bell tower and the priests' quarters. Only the main hall of 1948 carried the stricter criterion of exemplary design.

Dragons in the Clouds

Stand under the gate and look up along the ridge line.

The koryo running beneath the ridge is filled edge to edge with a carving of dragons among clouds. The space is not decorated at its centre and left plain at the margins, which would be the economical solution; it is worked across its entire length. Cloud-and-dragon compositions are a standard subject in Japanese religious carving, and their quality is judged by whether the beast reads as moving through the cloud or merely sitting on it.

The lesser carving repays as much attention as the dragons. The koryo and the projecting ends of the odaru beams carry eyo kurikata, the shaped and incised profiles that Japanese carpenters cut into the visible ends and edges of structural members. These profiles change with period, and the ones here are described in the national register as showy in the manner of the late Edo period. That is a dating tool as much as an aesthetic judgement. Early Edo profiles tend to be restrained and shallow; by the 1830s they had grown deep, curling and confident, and a carpenter of that generation would have been expected to demonstrate the fashion.

There is a resonance worth noticing between the gate and the main hall. Dragons appear in both: in clouds above the ridge beam here, and in the main hall as a carved pair spanning seven bays of transom at the boundary of the inner and outer sanctuaries. The two carvings are separated by roughly 120 years and by different hands, and the later one was executed by Nishitani Shoichi, a carpenter praised locally as a master. Whether the 1948 carving was answering the 1830 one is not recorded, but a builder working at this temple would have passed beneath the gate every day.

Visiting Fukusenbo

Fukusenbo is a working parish temple rather than a visitor attraction. There is no admission charge, no ticket desk and no published opening hours.

The gate is the most accessible of the four registered structures, since it can be examined closely from the public approach without entering anywhere private. The precinct beyond can generally be entered during daylight, giving views of the main hall, the bell tower and the priests' quarters from outside. Interior access to the main hall requires arrangement with the temple office in advance, and the priests' quarters are a private residence and not open at all. Photographing the gate from the approach is ordinarily unproblematic; refrain when a service or funeral is under way.

The Yoshida bus stop lies about 120 metres from the temple, a walk of two minutes, and the Akitakata City Hall stop is a little beyond it. Buses run from Hiroshima Bus Center toward the Yoshida depot in around an hour and twenty-five minutes, and from JR Kabe Station in roughly fifty minutes. The nearest station on the JR Geibi Line, Yoshidaguchi, is unstaffed and 3.8 kilometres out, so rail travellers generally continue to Mukaihara and take a taxi for fifteen to twenty minutes. By car it is about twenty minutes from the Takada interchange on the Chugoku Expressway.

The ruins of Koriyama Castle, the mountain stronghold from which the Mori clan governed much of western Japan, lie within walking distance, along with the Akitakata City Museum of History and Folklore. Fukusenbo occupies ground in the old town that grew beneath that fortress, and the temple's own history follows the clan's movements closely.