Jingu Agricultural Museum

A Wooden Building by the Architect of the Akasaka Palace

Jingu Nogyokan (神宮農業館, also written Jingū Nōgyōkan, the Jingu Agricultural Museum) is a museum building on the hill of Kurata-yama in Kanda-Kushimoto-cho, Ise City, Mie Prefecture, dating in its present form from 1905 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 1998.

The institution is older than that date. A citizens' association called the Shin'enkai, formed in 1886 to improve the grounds around Ise Jingu, opened the museum in 1891 on a plot in front of the Geku, the Outer Shrine. Its subject was deliberately unglamorous: what the products of the natural world are good for. Rice, silk, timber, salt, fish. The association raised money nationwide, secured a personal donation from the Meiji Emperor, and installed Prince Arisugawa Taruhito as its first president.

In 1905 the operation moved inland to Kurata-yama, the hill roughly midway between the Outer and Inner Shrines, and the building was enlarged as part of the move. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records 1905 as the date of the structure. Six years later the Shin'enkai handed the buildings and the entire collection over to Ise Jingu and dissolved itself, its stated purpose achieved.

The design is attributed to Katayama Tokuma (片山東熊), the dominant figure in Japanese court architecture of the period. He is remembered for the Akasaka Detached Palace, now the State Guest House, and for the national museums at Nara and Kyoto, all of them heavy masonry exercises in European styles. Timber was not his usual medium. The Nogyokan is one of a very small number of wooden buildings he produced, which is a large part of why it matters.

Why It Was Registered

Japan's Registered Tangible Cultural Property system, introduced in 1996, covers structures generally more than fifty years old. It is a lighter form of protection than designation as a National Treasure or Important Cultural Property: owners notify the government before making significant alterations, and in exchange receive technical guidance and tax relief. The system was built for exactly this kind of building, the Meiji and Taisho fabric that keeps disappearing while everyone argues about what to do with it.

The Nogyokan was registered on 9 October 1998, with the official gazette notice following on 26 October, under registration number 24-0021. The criterion cited is that the building serves as a model of design. Its neighbour, the Renaissance-style stone Jingu Chokokan, went onto the register in the same year, so a visitor can now see two registered works by one architect standing a short walk apart, in completely different materials.

The model for the Nogyokan was the Phoenix Hall of Byodoin at Uji, the eleventh-century temple building that appears on the ten-yen coin. Katayama borrowed its silhouette rather than copying it: a raised central pavilion under a hogyo roof (宝形造, a pyramid with four converging slopes), a wing to either side, and covered corridors making the connection. From outside, the building reads as Japanese. Inside, the roof structure is framed in the Western manner, with trussed carpentry doing work that traditional Japanese framing would have handled differently. The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary singles out this combination as evidence of unusual skill.

The plan has changed. The original layout enclosed a courtyard on all four sides. When the Jingu Art Museum was built in the 1990s on the Nogyokan's former site, the older building was dismantled and re-erected slightly to the east, and only the front portion was reconstructed, leaving the U-shaped plan seen today. The registered floor area is 439 square metres, single storey, tiled roof.

What to Look For on a Visit

Start at the entrance and look up. The plaque above the door was brushed by Prince Arisugawa Taruhito in 1891, which makes it older than the building it now hangs on, a survivor of the original Geku-front premises.

Inside, the exhibition rooms leave their structure visible. Posts and beams from the earlier phases of the building are exposed overhead, so the carpentry is on display alongside the objects. This is worth a moment. Most museums of this vintage have been re-clad and suspended-ceilinged into anonymity.

The collection runs to roughly 4,300 items and has a character all its own, largely because the Nogyokan escaped the 1945 air raid that destroyed the Chokokan's building and most of its holdings. There are sheaves of rice grown by the Emperor in the palace paddy and offered at the Kannamesai harvest festival, raw silk and cocoons presented by the imperial household, and material from the shrine's own production estates, the goryochi, where rice, salt, dried sea bream and abalone are still prepared for ritual offering. Alongside these sit displays that betray the museum's nineteenth-century origins: mounted sharks, wax models of plants, industrial samples shown at the Meiji-era National Industrial Exhibitions. Much of this was assembled by Tanaka Yoshio (1838-1916), the naturalist and product scientist who ran the museum's collecting programme and is often called the founding figure of Japanese museums and expositions.

Practical points. The museum admits visitors from 9:00 to 16:00, with the galleries open until 16:30. It closes on Thursdays, moving to the next weekday when a Thursday falls on a public holiday, and from 29 to 31 December. Admission to the Chokokan and Nogyokan together is 700 yen for adults and 200 yen for elementary and junior high school students. Preschool children enter free. Groups of twenty or more pay a reduced rate. Temporary closures for exhibition changes and fumigation are announced on the official site, so it is worth checking before setting out.

Photography inside is not simply open: the museum publishes an application form for filming, photography and image use, so anyone planning to take pictures should contact the office in advance on 0596-22-1700.

Getting there is straightforward without a car. The bus stop is Jingu Chokokan-mae, on the Miyuki-doro avenue directly outside the grounds, served by Sanco route buses on the Geku-Naiku line and by the CAN Bus sightseeing loop. Buses run from Iseshi Station, Ujiyamada Station, Isuzugawa Station and from both shrines, which makes the museum easy to fold into a day that already includes the Outer and Inner Shrines. Give yourself an hour inside, longer if the Chokokan and the art museum are on the list too.