Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum

What Is the Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum?

The Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum (金刀比羅宮宝物館) is a two-storey stone museum built in 1905 in the grounds of Kotohira Shrine in Kotohira Town, Kagawa Prefecture, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 20, 1996.

The building covers 165 m². Its walls are laid in Aoki stone, a granite quarried on Hiroshima Island in Kagawa; the roof is a hip-and-gable Irimoya-zukuri roof of clay tiles, and the entrance porch has a cusped Noki-karahafu gable sheathed in copper. It was designed by Kuru Masamichi, an architect at the Ministry of Education, and was first known as Kotohira Shrine Museum No. 1.

The official register reads the name Konpira-gū Hōmotsukan rather than Kotohira-gū. The museum stands in an area called Aobaoka on the right of the Sakura no Baba, the cherry-lined avenue beyond the Great Gate, next to the storehouse for the shrine's collection of folk-religion objects.

Why the Treasure Museum Is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property

It was registered as a building that has become a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs points to the mix: a traditional tiled hip-and-gable roof and a temple-style gabled entrance, combined with arched windows and articulated stone joints taken from Western masonry. The Agency sees it as an early case of a Japanese architect bringing Western design in earnest into a traditional building type.

Kuru Masamichi had designed the Japanese pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The shrine ranks the Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum with the Nara museum building of 1894, designed by Katayama Tōkuma, among the earliest museum buildings in Japan.

What to Look For at the Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum

Stand in front and the hybrid is plain to see: a tiled Japanese roof sits on granite walls, and the center of the facade projects in a copper-roofed karahafu porch of the kind you would expect at a temple gate, here fixed to the doorway of a stone building. Look along the walls for the round-headed arched windows and the crisp lines of the joints between the stones.

Inside are the shrine's treasures. The best known is a Heian-period standing figure of the Eleven-Headed Kannon, carved from a single block of Japanese cypress, 1,440 mm tall, once the principal image of the Kannon hall of Konkōin. A pair of six-panel screens said to date from around 1702 shows the shrine and its town on the day of the great festival. Exhibits rotate; since July 2026 the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons scroll has been on loan to the Kagawa Museum.

Visiting the Kotohira Shrine Treasure Museum

The museum is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with last entry at 4:30 p.m. Admission is 800 yen for adults and 400 yen for high school and university students, and free for junior high school students and younger (checked October 2026). A combined ticket for three facilities, with the Omoteshoin and the Takahashi Yuichi Museum, costs 1,500 yen for adults and 800 yen for students. Opening days are posted on the shrine's museum calendar, and there are occasional closures.

The exterior is visible from the Sakura no Baba and can be seen during worship hours even when the museum is closed. The website does not state whether photography is allowed inside, so ask at the entrance. Directions and general shrine hours are on the Kotohira Shrine page.