Ma Gate of Chongfu Temple

A gate named for the goddess of the sea

Sōfukuji, a Chinese Buddhist temple in the Kajiya-machi district of Nagasaki, keeps a gate that carries the name of a deity rather than a guardian figure. The Maso Gate, or Maso-mon, was built in 1666, during the middle of the Edo period. It is an eight-legged gate of the three-bay, three-doorway type, roofed in the hip-and-gable style and covered with pantiles.

The gate leads toward the hall of Maso, the sea goddess long honoured along the southern coast of China, where she is known as Mazu. Sailors called her by several titles, among them Tenkō Shōbo, and more familiarly Bosa, a word close to the Japanese for bodhisattva. For that reason the structure also goes by a second name, the Bodhisattva Gate.

Why the gate matters

Sōfukuji was founded in 1629 by Fujian merchants living in Nagasaki, who invited the monk Chōnen from Fuzhou to lead it. The temple belongs to the Ōbaku school of Zen and is often described as the oldest Chinese-style temple in Japan. Two of its buildings, the main hall, called the Daiyūhōden, and the inner Daiippōmon gate, are National Treasures; four more, the Maso Gate among them, hold the rank of Important Cultural Property.

The Maso Gate received that designation on 15 May 1972. Its front gives the eye something to settle on: an open ceiling of curved, ring-shaped rafters left exposed, a treatment common in Ōbaku architecture. The gate is built in a three-ridge form, and specialists value it as one element of an assembled precinct that records how a community of Chinese merchants built and rebuilt its religious center across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What to look for

Stand in front of the gate and look up. The curved rafters fan across the underside of the eaves, and the restrained finish of the timber lets the carpentry, rather than colour, hold your attention.

The gate's purpose becomes clearer at the hall beyond it. Each Chinese trading ship carried a small image of Maso for safety at sea. While the ship lay at anchor in Nagasaki, the image was brought ashore and kept in the temple's Maso Hall, then returned to the ship when it sailed. Carrying the goddess up from the harbour called for open ground, which is one reason the space here is wider than a gate alone would need. The present Maso Hall was rebuilt in 1794 with money raised from a gift of ten thousand catties of sugar made by a Chinese ship's captain.

A pair of stone sockets for flag poles still stands near the bell-and-drum tower. The banners they once held were tall enough to be seen by ships out in the harbour.

Around the temple

The Maso Gate is one stop on a walk through the whole of Sōfukuji. The vermilion Sanmon at the entrance, rebuilt in 1849, has the look of a dragon-palace gate from a folk tale. Beyond it the Daiippōmon, a National Treasure rebuilt in 1695, was cut and fitted in China and then assembled on the spot. Carved bats, peonies and peach blossoms, all auspicious in China, are worked into the timber throughout the grounds, and finding them is part of the pleasure of a visit.

The temple sits a short climb above the Sōfukuji tram stop, the terminus of lines 1 and 4 and about twelve minutes from Nagasaki Station. The surrounding Teramachi quarter holds several other temples within walking distance, and the Shianbashi district lies just downhill.