Imamiya Shrine Hiyoshisha

The Smallest of the Cluster

North of the Wakamiya-sha, a row of small halls lines up in the precinct, and at the south end of that cluster, facing east, stands the Hiyoshi-sha. It is the smallest of Imamiya's registered buildings, with a floor area of about 1.6 square metres, and dates from the late Edo period, sometime between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

At this scale a building is easy to walk past, but the Hiyoshi-sha is worth a moment for what it packs into so little space.

A Shelf Shrine in Miniature

The form is a one-bay nagare-style shelf shrine, the misedana-zukuri, roofed in copper sheet. The interior of the body is divided front and back, with a plank door at the boundary between the rooms and a lattice screen across the front of the front room.

The body stands on round pillars with boat-shaped brackets, while the canopy is carried on square pillars with a three-block bracket set, the tsuremitsudo, supporting the purlin, with a frog-leg strut set between. It is, in effect, a full shrine grammar worked at doll's-house scale.

Registration

The Hiyoshi-sha was registered in March 2018 under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. Rather than standing out on its own, it earns its place as part of the row of small halls that gives the northern part of the precinct its texture, one element in the layered picture of a long-lived shrine.