Tamurado

The Cabinet That Became a Building

Tamura-do (田村堂, also written Tamuradō), in the Kamihata district of Hata, Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, is a late Muromachi-period structure designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 August 1953. It is owned by the City of Matsumoto and measures one bay by one bay, single-storey, with a gable-and-hip roof of shingles laid in the kokerabuki technique and the gable end facing front.

One bay by one bay. A single span of column spacing in each direction, which makes this one of the smallest structures on Japan's national register of architecture. There is a reason for that. Tamura-do did not begin life as a building at all. It was made as a zushi, a cabinet for enshrining a Buddhist image, and only later came to stand on its own.

A zushi is liturgical furniture; the household Buddhist altars found in Japanese homes today belong to the same broad family. What lifts this one into the category of architecture is the seriousness of its joinery. Bracket complexes support the eaves. Rafters fan out in two overlapping tiers, a radial arrangement borrowed from Zen-influenced temple design. The pair of panelled doors carries interlocking-circle medallions and flower-motif latticework cut clean through the wood. Gold leaf originally covered the whole thing, and it takes little effort to picture how the object read in the dim interior of a temple hall.

What Remains of the Nikko of Shinano

Understanding Tamura-do means starting with a temple that no longer exists. Nyakutakuji stood about two kilometres southwest of the present site, halfway up Mount Mizusawa. It belonged to the Shingi Shingon school and carried the mountain names Jigenzan and Mizusawasan. Tradition credits its founding to the monk Gyoki in the Nara period and its later revival to Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, the general the Japanese court sent north in the early ninth century.

By the Edo period Nyakutakuji had grown into a substantial complex drawing pilgrims from across the Matsumoto basin, and people called it the Nikko of Shinano after the great shrine-temple complex north of Edo. A painted plan of the precinct, produced in the Bunka era between 1804 and 1817, survives and shows the layout at its fullest extent. Tamura-do appears on the topmost terrace.

Originally the cabinet sat inside one of the temple's halls. When a replacement was commissioned during the Edo period, the old cabinet was moved outdoors, given a statue of General Tamura to house, and became a hall in its own right.

Then came the anti-Buddhist campaigns of the early Meiji years. Nyakutakuji was dissolved. Its buildings were demolished or dispersed: the main hall went to Shokakuin in Imai, the bell tower to Kyokenji in Azusagawa, the Kannon hall down to Josenji at the foot of the mountain. Villagers carried Tamura-do downhill and set it in front of the Amida hall at Kamihata, where it stands today. The temple site itself now shows only stone terracing and foundation stones; it was listed as a Matsumoto City Special Historic Site on 22 March 2011.

Tamura-do was certified as an Important Art Object in 1937, upgraded to Important Cultural Property in 1953, and fully dismantled and rebuilt for conservation in 1965. Few buildings predating the Edo period survive anywhere in the Matsumoto basin, which is why a structure roughly the size of a garden shed carries the weight it does.

Viewing It Through the Shelter Door

Tamura-do now sits inside a protective shelter built in front of the Amida hall at Kamihata. Shelters of this kind are standard practice for small listed structures with fragile roofing, and shingle roofs are among the most vulnerable of all. Visitors look in from the shelter entrance rather than approaching the building itself.

The roof registers first. The gable end faces the viewer and the eaves project deeply for the scale of the structure. Those fanned rafters are the detail to linger on: the technique demands that every rafter be cut to a slightly different angle, and doing it twice over, in two tiers, is not the sort of work a village carpenter attempts casually.

Then the doors. The interlocking-circle medallions are pierced right through the panel, so on a bright day the pattern reappears as light on the shadowed side. When gold leaf still covered the surface, the cut edges would have caught as bright lines. General Tamura's statue remains inside.

Getting there is straightforward: about ten minutes on foot from Endo Station on the Alpico Kotsu Kamikochi Line, or roughly twenty minutes by car from JR Matsumoto Station. The route to Kamikochi and Norikura on National Route 158 passes just below. The surrounding Kamihata neighbourhood preserves older streetscapes, and Josenji, which received the Kannon hall and a substantial group of Buddhist sculptures from Nyakutakuji, sits nearby. The walking path up to the Nyakutakuji site starts from the same area. Seeing all three in one morning makes far more sense of the small hall than seeing it alone.

Enquiries go to the Cultural Properties Division of Matsumoto City, Azumi office. Anyone travelling a long distance should check in advance about access to the shelter and whether photography is permitted.