Kokubunji Temple Main Hall

A Kamakura Hall Standing on Eighth-Century Foundations

The main hall of Sanuki Kokubunji rests on stone plinths laid more than a thousand years ago for a different building. When carpenters raised the present hall in the late Kamakura period, sometime between 1275 and 1332, they set its pillars on the surviving foundation stones of the old lecture hall (kōdō) that had once served the provincial monastery founded under Emperor Shōmu. The building that resulted is a single-story hall, five bays wide and five bays deep, covered with formal half-cylinder roof tiles (hongawara-buki) under a hip-and-gable (irimoya) roof. Among the wooden Buddhist halls that survive in Shikoku, it is one of the largest.

The temple sits in the Kokubunji district of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, and goes by the full name Hakugyūzan Senjuin Kokubunji. It belongs to the Omuro branch of the Shingon school and is the eightieth of the eighty-eight temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage. Its beginnings reach back to 741, when an imperial edict ordered a provincial temple, or kokubunji, established in every province of the country. Sanuki was one of them, and the present hall is its medieval heir.

Why the Hall Matters

The building was registered as an Important Cultural Property on 29 August 1904, placing it among the earliest architectural designations made under Japan's first heritage-protection law. Part of its value lies in simple persistence. During the Tenshō-era fighting of the late sixteenth century, when forces under the Chōsokabe clan burned through the region, most of the temple's structures were lost. The main hall came through, and it remains one of the few buildings on the site to have escaped that destruction.

Documents from the Kamakura period record the temple as a branch of Saidai-ji, the great Nara monastery, and the hall's proportions sit comfortably within that tradition. Its reuse of the ancient lecture-hall foundations gives it an unusual double identity: a medieval structure occupying, almost exactly, the footprint of the eighth-century state temple. Few buildings tie the Nara-period provincial system so directly to a hall a visitor can still walk into.

The exterior repays a slow look. Paneled plank doors (sangarado) open at the front and the rear, lattice windows (renji-mado) fill the end bays, and plain board walls close off the remainder. Step inside and the southern two bays form an outer worship space, separated from the inner sanctuary by sliding latticed doors topped with a diamond-patterned transom. The inner sanctuary is divided into a central square three bays across, with narrow side chambers along the flanks, and a Buddhist altar dais (shumidan) set near the middle.

What to Look For on a Visit

On that dais stands a large lacquered shrine cabinet (zushi), and inside it the temple keeps its principal image: a standing Thousand-Armed Kannon. The main body was carved from a single block of zelkova (keyaki), with eleven heads and forty-two arms, and the figure rises roughly 5.2 meters. It is counted among the largest single-block statues in Shikoku. The image dates to the end of the Heian period and received its own Important Cultural Property designation on the same day in 1904 as the hall that shelters it.

One caution for planning. The statue is a hidden Buddha (hibutsu), shown to the public only about once every sixty years. The next scheduled opening is in 2040, so a visitor today will see the closed cabinet on its dais rather than the figure within.

The older temple shows itself outdoors, in stone. The whole of the former precinct is a Special Historic Site, the only such designation given to a temple ground in Shikoku. Foundation stones of the original golden hall lie across the grounds on a scale that invites comparison with the Golden Hall of Tōshōdai-ji in Nara. Near the gate sit the base stones of a seven-story pagoda; reconstructions suggest that, had it stood, it would have risen higher than the five-story pagoda of Tō-ji in Kyoto.

Around the Temple and Getting There

A bronze bell hangs in the bell tower. It carries no inscription, but its form is archaic enough that specialists place its casting in the Nara period, which would make it the oldest bell in Shikoku. The surrounding district is pine and bonsai country, and the temple's pine-lined approach grows out of that local trade. A short walk away, the Sanuki Kokubunji Site Museum displays roof tiles, pottery, and metalwork recovered in excavation, along with a scale model of the vanished golden hall.

Access is straightforward. Kokubu Station on the JR Shikoku Yosan Line lies about 300 meters from the gate, which makes the temple one of the easier pilgrimage stops to reach by train. By car, the Takamatsu-nishi interchange on the Takamatsu Expressway is roughly six kilometers off.