Konkai-Komyoji Temple Daihojo

The Great Abbot's Quarters at Kurodani

Northeast of the Founder's Hall, facing south, stands the Ōhōjō, the Great Abbot's Quarters of Konkai Kōmyō-ji. It is a long single-storey building of thirteen bays by eleven, roofed in pan tile under a hipped-and-gabled form, covering about 581 square metres. A broad open veranda runs across the front, tatami-edged verandas line the sides and rear, and a plain board veranda wraps the whole. This is one of the five temple buildings in the Okazaki hills of eastern Kyoto registered as Tangible Cultural Properties in August 2015.

A hōjō is the formal residence and reception hall of a temple's head priest. The Konkai Kōmyō-ji example follows the classic six-room plan, three rooms across the front and three behind, arranged so that sliding screens can open the interior into one grand space or close it into private rooms. The temple itself dates to 1175 and the founding of the Pure Land master Hōnen, but the present quarters are a twentieth-century work, completed in 1936 (Shōwa 11).

Built After the Fire, Designed to Impress

The earlier abbot's quarters burned in the 1934 fire that also took the Founder's Hall. What stands today replaced it on the same ground a couple of years later. The registration record praises the building as a high-quality and generously scaled work of shoin-style architecture, with the proportions of each part judged with unusual skill. It was registered as a model of design, the stricter of the two grounds used for the temple's structures.

The shoin style is the formal residential architecture of Japan's warrior and clerical elite, with built-in writing alcoves, staggered shelves, and decorated sliding partitions. At the Ōhōjō the refinement shows in the smaller details as much as the overall plan. Above the room partitions runs a band of horizontal latticework set into the frieze wall, and the coffered and boarded ceilings are finished with the same exacting care. These are the marks of skilled 1930s temple carpenters working in a centuries-old idiom rather than copying it mechanically.

Inside, the sliding screens carry painted compositions by recognised artists of the day. A tiger painting by Kubota Kinsen and a pine painting by Imao Keishō are among the works that decorate the rooms, the kind of large-format ink-and-colour painting that traditionally lined a hōjō. Because the interior is a private residence of the temple, these paintings are seen only when the building is opened for a special viewing.

A Site With a Bakumatsu Past

The Great Abbot's Quarters also sits at the centre of one of Kyoto's most consequential modern stories. In 1862 the lord of Aizu, Matsudaira Katamori, was appointed Protector of Kyoto and made Konkai Kōmyō-ji his headquarters, stationing around a thousand retainers across the precinct. The hilltop temple had been remodelled in a castle-like manner in the early Edo period, which made it defensible, and the Aizu garrison took over the abbot's quarters and many of the lodging halls. It was in this orbit that the Shinsengumi, the famous police force of the late shogunate, was organised. The building the Aizu men used stood here before the 1934 fire; the present quarters are its successor on the same site.

For a visitor, the value of the Ōhōjō is the contrast it holds. The architecture is calm, balanced, and quietly luxurious, while the ground beneath it carries the memory of a tense and crowded chapter of history. The garden viewing seasons, usually announced for spring and autumn, are the best chance to step up onto the veranda and take in both.