Five-Story Pagoda of Kyoogokokuji Temple

Tō-ji Five-Storied Pagoda: Japan's Tallest Wooden Tower in Kyoto

At 54.8 meters, the five-storied pagoda at Tō-ji is the tallest wooden tower standing in Japan. For travelers arriving by bullet train, it is often the first historic structure to appear, rising above the rooftops south of Kyoto Station as the shinkansen slows on its approach. The tower has marked the southern entrance to the old capital for centuries, and its outline remains one of the most recognizable in the city.

The temple's formal name is Kyōōgokoku-ji, though almost everyone calls it Tō-ji, meaning "East Temple." It was founded in 796, two years after the capital moved to Heian-kyō, and in 823 Emperor Saga granted it to the monk Kūkai, who made it the head training center of Shingon esoteric Buddhism. The pagoda occupies the southeastern corner of the precinct in Minami Ward, where it can be seen free of charge from the surrounding grounds and from the street outside the south gate.

Five Towers Across Twelve Centuries

The pagoda visitors see today is the fifth to stand on this spot. Kūkai began the first one after finishing the temple's lecture hall, but funds and labor ran short. In 826 he submitted a formal appeal to the court asking for help hauling timber, explaining that workers had located suitable wood in the Higashiyama hills east of the temple yet lacked the strength to move the heavy logs. The original pagoda was built to enshrine relics of the Buddha that Kūkai had carried back from Tang China.

Lightning proved the building's great enemy. Fire destroyed the pagoda four times over the following centuries, and each loss set off another long campaign to rebuild. The present structure was completed in 1644 under the patronage of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu. The carpenter in charge was Nakai Masazumi, who held the court title Yamato-no-kami and led the official building office responsible for major construction across the Kyoto region.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the structure's era year as Kan'ei 20 (1643), while the reconstruction was finished the following summer, in 1644. Both dates appear in reliable sources, reflecting the gap between the project's official reckoning and the moment the work was done.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The pagoda was first designated an Important Cultural Property in 1897 and raised to National Treasure status in 1952. Its value rests partly on its scale and partly on the disciplined way it was built. Each of the five roofs covers a square plan three bays wide, and the whole rests on a cut-stone platform without the projecting veranda found on many pagodas. The bracket complexes that carry the eaves are of the three-stepped type, with plain strut supports between them and almost none of the carved flourishes, such as decorative beam-end caps, that later carpenters liked to add.

Builders of the early Edo period working in Kyoto often returned to older, heavier proportions, and this pagoda counts as one of the finest results of that revivalist instinct. The timber is notably thick, and the construction follows the traditional Japanese manner known as wayō throughout. The first story is painted, yet the color scheme avoids the showiness common in seventeenth-century work, which is part of why specialists rate it so highly.

What to Look For

The first story conceals an esoteric Buddhist cosmos that ranks among the most concentrated in Japan. The central pillar running up through the tower is treated as Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic Buddha at the heart of Shingon teaching. Four seated Buddhas of the Diamond World surround it: Ashuku to the east, Hōshō to the south, Amida to the west, and Fukūjōju to the north, with eight bodhisattvas in attendance. The four inner pillars carry paintings of the Diamond World mandala, the outer pillars show the eight dragon kings, and the walls depict the eight patriarchs through whom Shingon teaching descended to Kūkai.

Look closely at that central pillar and you can see it is not a single trunk but several lengths joined together, its corners shaved flat. By the seventeenth century a single timber tall enough for the job was no longer available, so the carpenters spliced shorter pieces. It is a practical detail that quietly records the changing forests of Japan.

This interior stays closed for most of the year. The temple opens the first story only during set viewing periods, usually the first days of January, a winter season that runs into March, and limited spring and autumn windows. When the doors are shut, the pagoda still rewards a visit from outside, especially in the early morning after the gates open at five, when the grounds are quiet, or in cherry-blossom season, when the tower rises behind the pink canopy of the precinct's weeping cherry.

Around the Temple and Getting There

The pagoda is one stop on a half-day visit to Tō-ji. The Kondō, or main hall, rebuilt in 1603 and also a National Treasure, shelters a large seated Yakushi, the Buddha of healing. Behind it, the lecture hall holds a group of twenty-one statues arranged as a three-dimensional mandala, several of them National Treasures dating to Kūkai's own century. The Miedō, a quiet hall dedicated to Kūkai and free to enter, sits in the northwest of the grounds.

On the 21st of every month the precinct fills with the Kōbō-ichi flea market, where hundreds of stalls sell antiques, crafts, plants, and street food. Tō-ji is an easy fifteen-minute walk from the south side of Kyoto Station, or roughly seven minutes from Tōji Station on the Kintetsu line. Because the station is so close, the temple pairs naturally with a wider day in southern Kyoto, including Fushimi Inari Shrine a few train stops away.