Kasama Inari Shrine Main Hall

An Unpainted Shrine Behind a Crowded Forecourt

The Main Hall of Kasama Inari Shrine (笠間稲荷神社本殿, Kasama Inari Jinja Honden) stands in Kasama, Kasama City, Ibaraki Prefecture, was built in Manen 1, corresponding to 1860, and was designated an Important Cultural Property on 13 January 1988. The shrine is dedicated to Uka-no-Mitama, the deity of grain and by extension of harvest and commercial prosperity, and is known locally as Kurumigashita Inari and as Monzaburo Inari.

Most of the several million people who come here each year never see the designated building. They arrive at the forecourt, make their offering at the worship hall, buy an amulet, and leave. The worship hall is a twentieth-century structure painted in the shrine's own shade of vermilion, and it sits directly in front of the older building, blocking the view.

Walk around it. A path leads behind the worship hall, and the main hall is there, entirely unpainted, and covered in carving.

What the Designation Covers

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the property as one building, comprising the main hall proper together with the former worship hall in front of it. In the official description the former worship hall functions as the gejin, the outer chamber: three bays by two, single-storied, with a hipped-and-gabled roof, a one-bay offering porch, and an undulating gable over the eaves. Behind it the naijin, the inner chamber and the main hall in the narrow sense, is three bays square, gabled at the rear, joined at the front to the outer chamber, with its ridge carried up above the ridge of the outer chamber to form a gable facing forward. Both are roofed in copper sheeting worked to imitate ceramic tile. A single ridge tag is designated along with the building, and the designation number is 02192.

That linked arrangement, a main hall and a worship hall joined into one continuous structure, is the gongen form, and the profile it produces is the reason the Agency's own commentary describes the exterior as varied. Read the roofline from the side and the building steps up twice.

The material is zelkova throughout, left as bare timber. No pigment was applied to either the structure or the carvings. The Agency notes this plainness as characteristic of the closing years of the Edo period, and it changes how the building reads: with no colour competing for attention, the carving has to carry everything, and the grain of the wood becomes part of the composition.

The ridge tag is dated the eighteenth day of the ninth month of Manen 1, and its text invokes long military fortune for Makino Sadaaki, lord of Kasama, and peace within his domain. Kasama City's account of the building gives its construction as 1861, a year later than the date the Agency assigns. The two are reconcilable if the 1860 tag records the raising of the frame and the city is dating completion, but the discrepancy is worth knowing about.

The Carving, and When to Come

Three carvers are named on the reverse of the ridge tag: Goto Nuinosuke, Mirokuji Otohachi, and Moronuki Mangoro. The carpenters in charge were Shibayama Harima-no-sho Genshiji of Ozone village in Makabe district and Ebisawa Tarobei of Takahashi-cho in Kasama. All of them were local men, and the Agency's commentary makes a point of it: this is provincial work, by provincial hands, executed to a standard that stands comparison with anything from the metropolitan workshops of the same decade.

The set that draws specialists is on the outer walls of the inner chamber. Seven panels in relief run around three sides, and their subject is the gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, the poetry party held in the year 353 at which Wang Xizhi and his companions floated wine cups down a winding stream and composed verses before the cups reached them. It is a Chinese literary subject, well known to educated Japanese of the period, and rendering it across seven panels on the back and flanks of a rural Inari shrine says a good deal about what the patrons expected their carvers to know.

At the front, the offering porch carries a dragon swimming through waves on the gable pendant, a scene from Chinese story on the beam above, and a dragon carved to glare in eight directions at once from the space between the brackets. The bracketing of the outer chamber uses the three-stepped form with the slanting tail rafter of the Zen-influenced idiom, under doubled rafters set close.

The precinct is open without charge, and the walk behind the worship hall to reach the main hall takes a minute. Photography of the exterior is not restricted. The building is best read in flat morning light, when the relief panels on the north and west walls are not fighting deep shadow. Two wisteria trees in the precinct, one of them a prefectural natural monument, flower in early May, and the chrysanthemum festival that fills the grounds runs from late October into late November; those weeks bring the largest crowds of the year apart from the first days of January, when the shrine takes more New Year worshippers than anywhere else in Ibaraki. JR Kasama Station on the Mito Line is the nearest stop, a short taxi ride or a walk away.