Shinshoji Temple Main Hall

A Buddhist Main Hall with Walls of Stone

The Shinshoji Temple Main Hall (新照寺本堂, Shinshō-ji Hondō) is a single-storey stone main hall at Shinshoji Temple in Sumiyoshi, Aira City, Kagoshima Prefecture, raised in 1892 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on April 18, 2008, under registration number 46-0069.

Japanese Buddhist halls are almost always timber from sill to ridge. At Shinshoji the outer walls are laid up in stone, and a big hipped roof of interlocking pantiles sits on top of them. The hall measures 16 meters across the front and 18 meters deep, with a footprint of 290 square meters. The entrance is on the short end of the hipped roof, a layout Japanese builders call tsumairi.

The date comes from a munafuda, a wooden ridge tag nailed up when the roof frame was raised, which fixes 1892 as the raising year. Aira City gives 1893 for the completion of the Shinshoji Temple Main Hall; the difference may be the gap between raising the roof and finishing the building, but no source says so outright.

Why It Was Registered as Hard to Reproduce

Four structures at Shinshoji were registered on the same day, and the main hall is the only one listed under the criterion for structures that would not be easy to reproduce. The main gate, the stone wall and the side gate were listed for their contribution to the landscape. For the hall, what counted was the building itself.

Its ridge tag gives more than a date. It names both the master mason and the master carpenter, which suggests a division of labor: masons raised the stone shell, and carpenters built the timber roof that rests on it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs does not print the two names in its description, but a tag that credits a stonemason alongside a carpenter is itself a record of how this hall was made.

Aira City traces the decision to build in stone to members of a kakure nenbutsu confraternity, believers who had kept their Jōdo Shinshū faith in secret until the ban on it was lifted in 1876. The stone is said to have been cut in the Terashi district of Aira.

What to Look for on the Shinshoji Temple Main Hall

Start with the front of the roof. The builders cut the front slope of the hipped roof short and carried a separate roof down and forward from it to form the kōhai, the projecting porch over the steps where worshippers stand. The result is a heavy stone box under a broad tiled roof, with a single eave reaching out toward the gate.

Then walk to the sides and back. Each side wall and the rear wall has 2 buttresses standing out from the masonry, braces that keep the long stone walls from being pushed outward by the weight of the roof. Timber halls have nothing like them.

Finally, look at the corners. The four corners of the Shinshoji Temple Main Hall are built up with stones that jut out in alternating courses, a treatment the agency describes as quoin-like. Seen at an angle, the stepped corners stand out clearly against the flat wall faces.

Visiting the Shinshoji Temple Main Hall

The hall is still used for services, and the temple publishes no schedule for opening the interior and no admission fee. Whether you can go inside is up to the temple, so avoid service times and ask someone at the temple first. There is no posted policy on photography either; ask before taking pictures inside.

For the exterior, the best view of the porch and the hipped roof is from just inside the main gate on the south. The buttresses and the stepped corners are easiest to study on the west side, which is close at hand if you enter by the side gate.