Jisaiin Temple Entrance Corridor

The Link Between Main Hall and Priests' Quarters

Jisaiin Temple Entrance Corridor (慈済院玄関廊, Jisai-in Genkanrō) is the building that joins the main hall and the priests' quarters of Jisaiin, a Zen sub-temple within Tenryū-ji in Saga, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto; it dates to the late Edo period, between 1751 and 1830, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. It is a single-storey timber structure with a tiled roof covering 62 square meters, and its roof slopes down on two sides in the form called ryōsage-zukuri.

As the name suggests, it is both entrance and corridor. The eastern half receives visitors; the western half carries them toward the main hall. Anyone admitted through the front gate steps up into this building first.

A Survival of the Open Grand Corridor

The Jisaiin Entrance Corridor was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that while it serves as both entrance and passage, it keeps traces of an older arrangement: an open grand corridor linking the main hall and the kitchen block.

Zen temples often joined the abbot's hall and the priests' quarters with a broad corridor used for comings and goings and for ceremonial processions. At Jisaiin that corridor survives with a formal entrance built into it. Its value lies less in the building on its own than in its role as the hinge that ties the main hall, the priests' quarters and the front gate into one composition.

No exact date is known. The priests' quarters on one side date to 1799 and the main hall on the other to 1816, and the corridor's late Edo date range takes in both.

What to Look For: Three Rainbow Beams

In the eastern half, an entrance room sits behind a projecting Shikidai porch under an hip-and-gable roof. A shikidai is a formal entrance with a low step, designed so that a guest of rank could alight from a palanquin straight onto the floor. At the Jisaiin Entrance Corridor it lies almost directly opposite the front gate.

The real interest is the ten-mat room in the western half. Three rainbow beams span it, and flat plank-cut frog-leg struts set on them hold up an exposed decorative roof structure, a Keshō-yaneura, with no ceiling to hide it. The Agency calls this arrangement unusual. Putting three beams on show in a room that is essentially a passage is what lifts the Jisaiin Entrance Corridor above a plain hallway.

Seeing the Jisaiin Entrance Corridor

Jisaiin is normally closed to the public, so there is no general opportunity to see inside the Jisaiin Entrance Corridor or its three beams. No special openings were found.

Because the shikidai porch faces the front gate almost head-on, however, when the gate doors stand open the front of the entrance falls within view from the Tenryū-ji approach. Look from the approach and do not step through the gate. Getting to Tenryū-ji and its opening hours are covered on the Jisaiin Temple page.