Daikakuji Temple Guest Hall (Audience Hall)

One Building, Two Names

Daikakuji Kyakuden (大覚寺客殿（対面所）, Daikaku-ji Kyakuden (Taimenjo)) is a Momoyama-period audience hall at Daikakuji Temple in Saga Osawa-cho, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, built between 1573 and 1614 and designated an Important Cultural Property on February 8, 1912.

Visitors who look for a building with that name will not find one. Every sign in the precincts, every temple leaflet, and every guided talk calls it the Shoshinden (正寝殿). Kyakuden, the guest hall, and Taimenjo, the hall of audience, are the words the Ministry of Education used in 1912 when the designation was drawn up, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs has kept them ever since. The gap between register and usage is worth knowing before arriving, because catalogues and databases will send readers back and forth between the two.

The building stands to the north of the Shinden, close enough that the two share a covered approach. It is the older of the pair by roughly a generation, and its designation came fifteen years earlier.

Twelve Rooms and a Throne

The plan is unusual enough to be worth reading slowly. The hall measures seven bays across the front and eight across the back, four bays deep, under a single-story hip-and-gable roof of cypress bark. Inside, twelve rooms of varying size are set out in three north-south ranks.

The eastern rank holds four eight-mat rooms in sequence: the Kenji-no-ma, the Okanmuri-no-ma, the Momiji-no-ma, and the Take-no-ma. The central rank has two twelve-mat rooms, the Yuki-no-ma and the Taka-no-ma. The western rank has two long narrow rooms of nine mats each, one of them the Sansui-no-ma. Along the south and east sides run the saya, corridor-like rooms one bay wide.

The Okanmuri-no-ma, the Room of the Crown, is the one with a raised dais and a throne. Its name comes from Emperor Go-Uda, who took Buddhist vows in 1307, became Daikakuji's twenty-third abbot, and conducted cloistered government from the temple; he is said to have set his crown at his side while working. The room as it stands today is a re-creation of that setting rather than the original chamber, since the building itself postdates Go-Uda by nearly three centuries.

The same distinction applies to the temple's best-known claim about this hall. In 1392 the reconciliation of the Northern and Southern Courts was concluded at Daikakuji, with Emperor Go-Kameyama surrendering the three imperial regalia to Emperor Go-Komatsu. The temple records that the negotiation took place in this hall. Given the Momoyama construction date, the account describes the site rather than the fabric, and the temple's own wording keeps the traditional form, "said to have been held here."

Paintings, and the Problem of Getting In

The sliding panels of the Shoshinden and the Shinden are designated together as Important Cultural Property paintings, roughly 240 faces in all. Two hands dominate. Kano Sanraku (1559-1635) painted in monochrome ink here rather than on gold: his pines and hawks in the Taka-no-ma are severe where the peonies he painted for the Shinden are lavish. Watanabe Shiko (1683-1755), working more than a century later, added the smaller pieces, among them the hares that appear low on the panels of the saya rooms, placed at the height of someone kneeling.

Now the difficulty. The Shoshinden is normally closed. It does not appear on the standard Hall Area route, and a visitor who buys the ordinary ticket will pass its outer walls without entering.

Openings do happen. Daikakuji marks 1,150 years since its founding by imperial decree in 2026, and a special viewing ran from June 21 to August 3, 2025, at a supplement of 500 yen on top of Hall Area admission, with monks giving a fifteen-minute talk at 10:00, 13:00, and 15:00 each day without reservation. That period has ended. Anyone hoping to see the interior should watch the temple's news pages for the next announcement, since these openings are timed to anniversaries and seasonal exhibitions rather than fixed in the calendar.

Even without entry, the visit is worth planning. Hall Area admission is 800 yen for adults and 400 yen for elementary through high school students after the April 2026 revision, with the gate open from 9:00 to 17:00 and the desk closing at 16:30; the Osawa-no-ike pond area is a separate ticket. Photography inside the halls is not permitted. The temple is about 20 minutes on foot from JR Saga-Arashiyama Station.