Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine Five-Ringed Pagoda

A Stone Pagoda Built on a Scale Few Ever Attempted

The stone pagoda beside the gate of Jinno-ji temple rises 6.08 meters from its base, tall enough that taking in the topmost stone means tilting your head well back. This is the Iwashimizu Hachimangu Gorinto, a five-ring stone pagoda at the foot of Otokoyama in Yawata, in the southern reaches of Kyoto Prefecture. Its lowest tier measures 2.44 meters across, and it is the largest medieval gorinto in Japan.

A gorinto is a Buddhist form assembled from five stacked stones, each shaped to represent one of the five elements that, in esoteric Buddhist thought, make up the physical world. Counting from the ground up, they are earth as a cube, water as a sphere, fire as a pyramidal block resembling a roof, wind as a hemisphere, and the void as a jewel-like finial. Most pagodas of this kind are modest markers set in temple grounds and cemeteries. This one was raised at a size rarely risked in stone.

The pagoda once stood inside Gokuraku-ji, the Buddhist temple attached to Iwashimizu Hachimangu during the long centuries when shrine and temple operated as a single religious institution. That temple was later dismantled, and the pagoda is what was left behind. It now sits near the shrine's first torii gate at the base of the mountain, a few minutes on foot from the lower precinct.

Why It Is Designated, and Why It Puzzles

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the pagoda to the late Kamakura period, roughly between 1275 and 1332. The dating rests on the proportions of the carved stones rather than on any written record. It was designated an Important Cultural Property on February 19, 1957.

What sets it apart is partly its size and partly its silence. The granite bears no inscription anywhere. There is no carved date, no donor's name, no dedication to explain why a pagoda on this scale was raised at this spot. For a monument so large, that absence is conspicuous, and it has left room for several rival accounts of how the pagoda came to be.

The Stories the Stone Cannot Confirm

The best-known account supplies the pagoda's popular name, Kokai Kinento, the Tower Commemorating Safe Passage. A wealthy merchant from Amagasaki in Settsu Province, sailing home from trade with Song China, was caught in a violent storm. He prayed to the deity of Iwashimizu Hachimangu, reached land unharmed, and in gratitude is said to have raised the pagoda around the Joan era of 1171 to 1174. Sailors later came here to pray before their voyages, and the name held.

Other versions place it later. One holds that it was built in the 1220s to console the souls of warriors who died in the violent politics of the early Kamakura period. Another ties it to the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, crediting the monk Eison of Saidai-ji, who is said to have prayed at the shrine and then built the pagoda to mourn the dead on both sides. A separate tradition treats it as the grave of Gyokyo, the monk who founded the shrine in the ninth century.

Before the Edo period the monument went by yet another name, the imiake-to, the tower of mourning's end. Families would come at the close of the forty-nine-day mourning period for a parent to wash away the defilement of grief.

Even the building of it carries a tale. When laborers tried to lever the great stones into position with iron bars, fire is said to have leapt from the joints and burned through their ropes. Only cords woven from Yawata bamboo could finish the job.

What to Look for Up Close

Stand near the base and the geometry behind the form becomes legible. Each tier is a clean solid, and the progression from the cubic earth-stone to the round water-stone to the broad pyramidal fire-stone gives the whole a deliberate, tapering rhythm as the eye climbs. The granite is smoother than that of most old stone pagodas, which tend toward rough, moss-darkened surfaces. The relatively clean stone is one reason scholars have found its exact age so hard to pin down.

It is worth circling the pagoda rather than viewing it head-on. Seen from the side, the way each element bears down on the one beneath it makes the engineering of the thing plain, and the question of how such weight was raised by hand in the thirteenth century settles back into the legends.

Around the Site

The pagoda sits at the foot of Otokoyama, the 143-meter hill crowned by Iwashimizu Hachimangu itself, one of Japan's three principal Hachiman shrines. The main shrine complex of ten structures was designated a National Treasure in 2016. Built in the broad hachiman-zukuri style, it is the largest and oldest surviving example of that architecture, and its present halls date to a 1634 reconstruction sponsored by the Tokugawa shogunate.

From the station at the base, a short cable-car line climbs to the upper precinct in about three minutes, an easy alternative to the roughly thirty-minute walk up the wooded approach. Near the pagoda stands the first torii, a granite gate about nine meters tall whose plaque was brushed in 1619 by the calligrapher Shokado Shojo. The character for "hachi" in the inscription is drawn as a facing pair of doves, the shrine's emblematic bird.

Otokoyama has been a cherry-blossom destination since the Heian period. In spring the slopes and the Sewaritei embankment along the Kizu River below fill with blossom, and the observation deck at the nearby Sakura-de-Aikan gives a long view over the river confluence. Autumn brings color to the same hillsides.