Zenkoji Temple Sanmon Gate

The Gate You Are Allowed to Climb

The Zenkoji Temple Sanmon Gate (善光寺三門, Zenkoji Sanmon, also written Zenkō-ji Sanmon and referred to by the temple as the Sanmon 山門), the great gate of Zenkoji Temple in Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture, was completed in 1750 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 May 1965. Two spellings circulate for the same building. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers it under the characters 三門, the Buddhist term for a gate of three liberations; the temple's own signage and tickets use 山門, the general word for a temple gate. Same structure, same 1750 date.

Construction began in 1744, six years before the dedication ceremony that installed the images upstairs. The head carpenter was a local man recorded simply as Uemon, described in the sources as a Zenkoji temple carpenter. He was working in the shadow of the main hall finished four decades earlier by a shogunal master builder from Edo, and the gate he produced holds its own beside it.

The form is a five-bay, three-entrance, two-storey double-roofed gate under a hipped-and-gabled roof. Five bays across, with the central three open as passages. Nothing closes them. There are no doors at all in the walkways, which is one reason the gate feels less like a boundary than a frame: the main hall lines up dead centre as you pass beneath.

Reading the Details

Stand back on the flagstones and work upward. The bracketing is a triple-stepped system built on Japanese-style (wayō) principles, but the carver could not leave it plain. On the first storey the intermediate supports are frog-leg struts; on the second they become simple block-and-strut units. The bracket arms of the lower storey swell into fist-shaped noses, and the decorative curved profiles across the gate are pronounced enough that architectural historians single them out as characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century.

The centre three bays of the facade carry panelled doors. The end bays and the flanks are latticed windows. Flame-shaped katōmado windows open in the front end bays, and the Agency's record notes that guardian images were housed behind them. Upstairs, a railed veranda runs the full circuit, and the ceiling inside is a flat mirror ceiling rather than a coffered one.

The roof has a complicated history, and the sources do not fully agree. The Agency's designation record lists the structure as cypress-bark thatch and its commentary explains that the gate was originally roofed in thin wooden shingles (kokerabuki) before being changed to cypress bark in 1930. The temple gives a further chapter: between October 2002 and December 2007, the gate underwent its first full-scale restoration, prompted by foundation damage from the Zenkoji earthquake of 1847 and the Matsushiro earthquake swarm of the 1960s. That work returned the roof to wooden shingles, which the temple describes as tochibuki, a heavier shingle than kokerabuki, and states that the result is the largest surviving building of its kind in Japan. Anyone standing below today is looking at shingles, not bark, though the national register still records the older specification.

Going Upstairs

Public access to the upper storey had lapsed for about forty years. It resumed in 2008, once the restoration was complete, and the climb is the reason to buy a separate ticket.

The object of worship up there is Monju Bosatsu seated on a lion, flanked by the Four Heavenly Kings, set on an altar toward the rear of the central bay. Around them stand miniature versions of the eighty-eight Shikoku pilgrimage buddhas, and the partition paintings have been brought back to full colour.

The walls tell a different kind of story. They are covered in ink graffiti left by visitors between the Edo period and the early Shōwa era, back when climbing the gate and signing it was simply what pilgrims did. Among the marks are what appears to be a drawing of Sakurajima beside the Shimazu family crest, names from the Mori house that governed Akō after the Asano, and an inscription attributed to the Chōshū Kiheitai. The temple asks visitors firmly not to imitate the practice; defacing a cultural property is a criminal offence.

Step out onto the veranda and the plaque is right in front of you. Written by Prince-Abbot Kōchō of Rinnōji, it reads Zenkōji in three characters and covers roughly the area of three tatami mats. It is known as the pigeon-character plaque because five pigeons are hidden in the strokes, and the first character is said to resolve into the face of an ox if you look at it the right way. The board hanging today is the second, made during the restoration; the original is displayed in the temple museum.

Then turn. North, the main hall fills the view at close range, and its T-shaped ridge is far easier to read from this height than from the ground. South, the approach runs straight down through the shop-lined Nakamise street into the city of Nagano.

Climbing the Zenkoji Temple Sanmon Gate

Passing beneath the Zenkoji Temple Sanmon Gate costs nothing and is possible at any hour. Climbing to the upper storey needs the Sanmon ticket, sold at the gate itself; prices and opening hours for the whole temple are on the Zenkoji Temple page. Children of primary school age and under cannot climb on their own and must come with a guardian.

The stairs are steep and narrow in the way old timber stairs are, and there is no lift. Wear shoes you can manage on a wooden tread.

Step out onto the upper gallery and the pigeon-character plaque is right beside you. To the north the great roof of the Main Hall fills the view; to the south the approach runs back down past Nakamise to the Niomon Gate, with the city of Nagano beyond. Nowhere else in the precinct lets you look over the temple from above.

Zenkoji says that photography and the use of images within the precinct and its buildings require an application. Leave the camera down in front of the images and the graffiti upstairs, and clear any pictures meant for news or publication with the temple office.