Konkai-Komyoji Temple Entrance

The Entrance Hall Where Two Styles Meet

On the east side of the Great Abbot's Quarters at Konkai Kōmyō-ji, joined to the temple office, stands the Genkan, the formal entrance hall. It is a single-storey wooden building of about 209 square metres, roofed mostly in pan tile with copper sheet over part of it. The ridge runs north to south, and the building presents its gable end to the front under a hipped-and-gabled roof. At the centre of that front, a car porch projects, crowned by its own small undulating gable in copper. This is one of the five temple buildings in eastern Kyoto registered as Tangible Cultural Properties in August 2015.

An entrance hall of this kind is more than a vestibule. At a head temple it is the threshold of ceremony, where important guests were received and led toward the abbot's quarters behind. The Genkan was built in 1936 (Shōwa 11), part of the reconstruction that followed the 1934 fire, and it was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

Japanese Frame, Western Detail

The interest of the Genkan lies in what the early-Shōwa builders allowed themselves to mix. The plan is a long, narrow arrangement of six rooms with a wide corridor along the rear, a thoroughly Japanese organisation. Within it, though, the rooms set up a deliberate contrast. One is a board-floored reception room in a Western manner; another is a tatami sitting room in the shoin style. Placing the two side by side was a choice, not an accident, and it captures the moment when a traditional temple was comfortable receiving guests in either mode.

That same openness appears in the trim. The bones of the building are Japanese, but Western-influenced details have been worked into the design, the sort of small departures that became common in better Japanese buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. The result is a hall that reads as fully traditional from a distance and reveals its hybrid character only as you look closer.

The car porch at the centre of the front is the clearest expression of all this. A porte-cochère is a practical feature, a covered place to arrive and step down out of the weather, yet here it is dressed with a copper-roofed undulating gable, the most formal gesture in the Japanese roofing vocabulary. Function and ceremony are handled in a single small structure.

What to Notice

Approach the Genkan from the front and look first at the car porch, comparing its copper gable with the larger karamon gate that fronts the abbot's quarters nearby. The two undulating gables, one over a working entrance and one over a ceremonial gate, show the same form put to different uses within a few steps of each other. Then take in the way the gable-end front and the projecting porch compose together, a quieter arrangement than a grand hall but carefully balanced.

Because the entrance hall connects to the temple office and to the abbot's quarters, the rooms inside, including the contrast of Western reception room and Japanese sitting room, are seen during special viewings rather than on a casual visit. The exterior can be appreciated from the grounds whenever the precinct is open.