Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall

The One Building You Stand Inside

Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall is an open-sided worship structure in the Jingu district of Miyazaki City, built in 1907 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in January 2010. It occupies the middle of the approach, set between the main gate to the south and the offering hall to the north, and it is where worshippers stop.

The plan is three bays square, a little over 42 square meters, under a gabled copper roof. Round columns rise from individual footing stones. There are no walls. All four sides stand open, and the ground underfoot is not a raised timber floor but paving laid directly on the earth, so the building is entered by walking rather than by stepping up.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it in six characters that translate awkwardly but say the essential thing: large in scale, and open. Among the ten precinct structures listed together in 2010, Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall is the only one whose interior is a place the public occupies as a matter of course.

Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall was built in 1907. It sits exactly on the north-south axis of the approach, the one position from which both the main gate and the offering hall can be taken in at once.

Registered for the Landscape It Helps Make

The criterion under which Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall was listed is that it contributes to the historic landscape of the nation. In a precinct where nearly every structure earned the same citation, the phrase describes a collective effect, and this building carries an outsized share of it because it is the one that frames the view.

Stand at the gate and the hall is a screen of columns with a roof on top; the offering hall beyond is seen through it, divided into vertical slices. Walk forward and the slices widen. Walk through and turn around and the gate is framed the same way from the other direction. A solid building at this point in the approach would have closed the axis; an open one keeps it working in both directions.

Registration number 45-0062 was assigned on 15 January 2010, with the gazette notice following on 3 February. The listing covers the structure only, and no interior fittings are included, which is unsurprising given that there is no interior in the usual sense.

What to Look For

Look up first. Because there is no ceiling, the roof frame of Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall is fully exposed as a Keshō-yaneura, finished to be seen. Across each of the three transverse bays runs a pair of rafters leaning together in a triangle, the carpentry known as inoko-sasu. Three of them in a row, evenly spaced, read as a kind of structural rhythm once you notice the first.

Then look at the joints. Horizontal ties pass through the columns at door-head height, and above each column sits a single shaped block, the boat-shaped bracket that carries the purlins and beams. It is the plainest bracket in the Japanese carpenter's repertoire. Nothing is layered, nothing is carved. The short walls above the ties are boarded, and the eaves rafters run in one widely spaced tier.

Finally look down. The stone paving is a deliberate choice, not a cost saving: it lets rain blow through and drain, which is what an open building on a coastal plain needs. It also means the boundary between outside and inside is drawn only by the roofline overhead.

In the late afternoon the low sun comes in sideways under the eaves and throws the shadows of all twelve columns across the paving at once. It is the moment the building is easiest to photograph.

Visiting Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall

Access is as simple as it gets. Because Miyazaki Shrine Haisho Worship Hall has no doors, it is available whenever the precinct itself is open. It is never shut off separately, and no barrier keeps visitors back.

You may stand under the roof, and most visitors do, since this is the point from which worship is offered toward the buildings to the north. Ordinary photography is not restricted, though the hall is used for rites during the day and it is worth waiting if a ceremony is in progress.

Access and the hours of the precinct are covered on the Miyazaki Shrine page.