Daikakuji Temple Shinden

A Consort's Palace, Taken Apart and Raised Again

Daikakuji Shinden (大覚寺宸殿, also written Daikaku-ji Shinden) is the principal ceremonial hall of Daikakuji Temple in Saga Osawa-cho, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, dated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to 1619 and designated an Important Cultural Property on April 25, 1927.

The hall was not built for a temple. Tradition at Daikakuji holds that it stood inside the imperial palace compound as the residence of Tokugawa Masako, daughter of the second Tokugawa shogun, who entered the palace in 1620 as consort to Emperor Go-Mizunoo and is remembered by her later title, Tofukumon-in. The emperor granted the building to Daikakuji, where it was dismantled and reassembled. Recent museum catalogues describe the transfer with the careful phrase "said to have been moved," since no dated document fixes the year it arrived.

The name announces rank. At a monzeki temple, one whose abbots were drawn from the imperial house, the hall used for formal audiences is called the shinden; the character shin refers to the sovereign. Daikakuji had abbots of imperial or princely blood until the early Meiji era, and its full title, Kyu-Saga-Gosho Daihonzan Daikakuji, still opens with the words "former Saga Palace."

What the Designation Recognizes

Measured across the front, the Shinden runs 20.0 meters, with a depth of 13.6 meters. It is a single-story building under an irimoya hip-and-gable roof laid with cypress bark, the material called hiwadabuki, which is thin, layered, and quietly expensive to renew.

What matters to architectural historians is the manner rather than the size. Instead of the plaster walls and hinged doors of a Buddhist hall, the Shinden uses shitomido, lattice shutters hinged at the top that swing up and hook open, so that a whole face of the building can be lifted away. That device belongs to shinden-zukuri, the aristocratic residential style of the Heian court, and its survival in a building of the 1610s makes the Shinden a witness to how the palace kept old forms alive long after they had left ordinary use.

The painted surfaces carry their own designation. The sliding panels and paper doors of the Shinden and the neighboring Shoshinden, some 240 faces in all, are protected together as Important Cultural Property paintings, most of them by Kano Sanraku (1559-1635), the artist who carried the Kano workshop's Momoyama manner into the Edo period in Kyoto. The peonies of the Botan-no-ma and the red plum of the Kobai-no-ma are his best-known work at the temple.

What to Look For on a Visit

The Shinden comes early on the standard route through the Hall Area, straight after the shop, and visitors reach it before the covered walkways carry them on to the Shingyo-zenden and the Godaido. Allow about an hour for that circuit.

Stand on the veranda first and look at the courtyard of raked white sand. Two trees flank the steps: a mandarin orange on the right as you face out, a plum on the left. The Kyoto Imperial Palace places a cherry in that left-hand position, so the plum here is a small departure worth registering, a reminder that the building came from a palace but now keeps a temple's calendar.

Then look up at the shutters. The metal fittings on the shitomido are cast in the shape of cicadas, tiny enough that most people walk past them. The gable boards and the ceilings repay the same slow attention.

Between the Shinden and the Shingyo-zenden runs the Murasame-no-roka, the Corridor of Passing Rain. Its uprights were likened to falling rain and its right-angle turns to lightning. The ceiling is deliberately low, so that no blade could be raised in it, and the floor is laid to squeak underfoot.

One practical caution about the paintings: the panels now hanging in the rooms are reproductions, the originals having been moved into the temple's storage building. They are shown in the Meihoten exhibitions held each spring and autumn, so anyone who wants to see Sanraku's own brushwork should check the exhibition dates before choosing a date.

The Hall Area is open from 9:00 to 17:00, with the reception desk closing at 16:30, and admission has been 800 yen for adults and 400 yen for elementary through high school students since the revision of April 1, 2026; the Osawa-no-ike pond area is ticketed separately at 500 yen and 100 yen. Photography and video are not permitted inside the halls, and monopods and tripods are barred throughout. Daikakuji is roughly a 20-minute walk from JR Saga-Arashiyama Station, 25 minutes from Randen Saga Station, and 35 minutes from Hankyu Arashiyama Station.