Nyoiji Temple Amida Hall

The Oldest Building in Kobe

The Amida Hall at Nyoi-ji holds a distinction that is easy to miss on a quiet hillside: it is the oldest building still standing anywhere in Kobe. It was raised in the early Kamakura period (1185–1274), on a wooded slope in Hazetani in the western part of the city, at the point where the modern Seishin New Town gives way to fields and forest. Nyoi-ji is a Tendai temple, and its mountain name is Hikinzan.

The hall is square in plan, three bays across and three bays deep, with a single-story hip-and-gable roof. The roof is now covered in copper sheeting worked to imitate the older tochi shingle finish. Its proper name is the Jōgyō-dō, the Hall of Constant Walking.

Why It Was Designated

The hall was designated an Important Cultural Property on 19 July 1952. Its value rests on more than its age. The building was made for jōgyō-zanmai, an exacting Tendai discipline in which a practitioner circles the central altar for days at a stretch, chanting the name of Amida Buddha without lying down to sleep.

Inside sits a figure of Amida Nyorai made at roughly the same time as the building, registered as a Kobe city cultural property. Halls of this kind rarely keep their original principal image. At Nyoi-ji the structure and its statue have come down together, and that pairing is much of what makes the hall worth seeking out.

What to Look For

The entire front of the hall is closed by shitomido, hinged lattice panels that lift and hook open near the ceiling. When the building is shut, you look through the lattice into the dim interior, where the gilt of the Amida figure picks up what little light reaches inside.

Stand back and the larger arrangement becomes clear. The Amida Hall sits to the west, the three-storied pagoda of 1385 to the east, and the Monju Hall of 1453 in front, all set around the site of a vanished main hall in the layout favored by early Tendai temples. The roof of the Amida Hall, low and broad under the hip-and-gable form, reads as plain rather than showy, which suits a building meant for solitary practice.

The Temple and Its Setting

A founding story credits the monk Hōdō with establishing Nyoi-ji in 645, though excavation points to a temple that does not predate the mid-twelfth century. At its height it counted roughly two dozen sub-temples spread across a broad precinct. The main hall, damaged in the war, was taken down soon afterward and survives only as a scatter of foundation stones.

The Niō gate stands well apart from the rest of the temple, a measure of how far the grounds once reached. Within it are two clay guardian figures from the mid-Kamakura period, an unusual material for such statues. The woodland and farmland around the temple are protected as a cultural environment preservation zone, which keeps the approach much as it has been for generations.

The temple lies about a 20-minute walk from Seishin-Minami Station on the Seishin-Yamate subway line, by way of the Sunrise hiking course. A Shinki bus from Seishin-Chūō or Akashi reaches the Taniguchi stop, leaving roughly a 12-minute walk. Nyoi-ji is a working temple, not a sightseeing complex, and the buildings are not open inside, but the grounds can be walked freely. A short distance away stand Taisan-ji, whose main hall is a National Treasure, and Fukuju Ritsuin, a former Nyoi-ji sub-temple with a garden long attributed to the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.