Jakushoji Temple Kannon Hall

A Plastered Hall on the Old Pilgrim Road

Jakushoji Kannon Hall (寂照寺観音堂, also written Jakushō-ji Kannon-dō) is a Buddhist hall in Nakanocho, Ise City, Mie Prefecture, built around the middle of the nineteenth century and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 July 2011.

The building measures 4.8 metres across the front and 7.7 metres deep, with a floor area of 42 square metres. It faces west, standing just south of the temple's Konpira Hall. The roof is irimoya, a hipped-and-gabled form, laid with hongawara tiles, the heavy alternation of concave pan tiles and semicylindrical cover tiles used on formal religious buildings. The gable end faces forward rather than the long eaves side, an arrangement called tsumairi, and a single-bay canopy porch (kōhai) projects over the entrance.

What sets the hall apart is its skin. Instead of exposed posts and infill panels, the walls are finished as a continuous white plaster ōkabe, a thick lime-plaster envelope that buries the timber frame completely. The result reads less like a temple hall than like a dozō, the fireproof storehouse type found behind merchant shops all over Japan. Almost nothing of the structural carpentry shows from outside.

Step under the porch and the interior reverses the impression. The floor is laid with tatami. The ceiling is saobuchi, thin boards held by slender battens. A Buddhist altar sits hard against the rear wall, and on it stands the image that gives the hall its name.

Senhime, and a Statue That Travelled

Jakushoji itself was founded in 1677 as a memorial temple for Senhime (1597–1666), the granddaughter of Tokugawa Ieyasu and daughter of the second shogun, Hidetada. Chikan, a prelate of the Chion-in lineage in Kyoto, revived an existing temple at Furuichi in Ise and installed her memorial tablet there. The choice of site followed her own devotion: Senhime had venerated Ise Jingu during her lifetime, and Furuichi lay on the road pilgrims took between the shrine's Outer and Inner precincts.

Senhime's life had been arranged and rearranged by politics. Married at seven to Toyotomi Hideyori, she was carried out of Osaka Castle when the Toyotomi fell in 1615, later remarried to Honda Tadatoki, and after his death took the tonsure under the religious name Tenjuin.

According to Ise City's cultural property office, the standing Kannon image enshrined in this hall was given to Jakushoji through that connection, sent from Guhōji at Iinuma in what is now Jōsō City, Ibaraki Prefecture. Guhōji was Senhime's own memorial temple in the east, and its formal name carries the same characters as her religious name, Tenjuin. A statue that began in the Kantō plain therefore ended up in a small plastered hall in Ise, linked to the first by nothing but a woman's posthumous name.

The hall's construction date is not documented. Ise City places it in the mid-nineteenth century on stylistic grounds, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs records it simply as late Edo.

Why It Was Registered

Japan runs two parallel systems for architectural heritage. The older one, designation, produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and applies to a small number of buildings of the highest rank. The newer one, registration, was introduced in 1996 for the far larger population of buildings that shape the everyday historic landscape. Registration carries lighter obligations for the owner and encourages continued use rather than freezing a structure as a museum piece.

Jakushoji Kannon Hall was registered under registration number 24-0106 in the seventieth round of listings, on the criterion that it contributes to the historic landscape of the nation. Its two neighbours went on the register the same day: the Konpira Hall as 24-0105 and the temple gate as 24-0107.

That grouping matters. The Agency's own description of the hall ends by noting that it stands alongside the Konpira Hall and gives the temple precinct its character. The three buildings were assessed as a set, not as isolated specimens, and the plastered hall earns its place partly by what it does to the view.

What to Look For

Stand west of the two halls and the contrast becomes the point of the visit. Konpira Hall, 1839, shows its timber openly: round front columns, bracket blocks under the eaves, rafters counted out along the edge of the roof. Kannon Hall, a few decades later, shares the same irimoya roof and the same gable-forward orientation, then hides everything below the eaves under white plaster. Two halls, one grammar of roof, opposite treatments of the wall.

The porch is the exception. Under the kōhai canopy the frame surfaces again, and this is the only place on the front elevation where the carpentry can be read directly.

Furuichi has burned more than once. The plastered ōkabe is the standard construction for resisting fire, which is why storehouses use it, though no surviving document explains the decision here. Whatever the reasoning, the effect is a Buddhist hall wearing the clothes of a merchant's strongroom, an unusual thing to find in a temple precinct.

In the grounds stands a stone figure of Gessen (1741–1809), the painter-monk who became abbot in 1774 and rebuilt the temple with money earned from his brush. He died three decades before either hall was raised, so neither is his work, but the precinct as visitors see it today grew out of the recovery he set in motion.

Visiting

The precinct of Jakushoji can normally be entered without charge, and the exterior of the Kannon Hall can be seen from the grounds. Hall interiors are not open on a regular basis, and the Kannon image is not on general view, so anyone hoping to see inside should telephone the temple in advance on 0596-22-3743. Mie Prefecture's tourism information carries the same advice: check before travelling, since access to the temple's cultural properties varies.

Photography of the buildings from the grounds is generally unproblematic, but this is an active Jōdo-sect temple with a working cemetery, and permission should be sought for anything beyond casual snapshots.

From Ise-shi Station (JR and Kintetsu) or Ujiyamada Station (Kintetsu), take a Mie Kotsu bus bound for Urata-chō and get off at Nakanocho; the temple is about two minutes on foot. The bus ride takes roughly ten minutes. The walk from either station takes about twenty-five minutes uphill along the old pilgrim route.

Two other stops sit within a few minutes' walk. The Ise Furuichi Sangū Kaidō Museum, run by the city, explains the pleasure quarter and the Ise kabuki tradition that once filled this hillside. Asakichi Ryokan, a rambling timber inn built into the slope and itself a registered cultural property, is the last substantial building left from the quarter's heyday.