Shofukuji Bell and Drum Tower

Sōfukuji Bell-Drum Tower

A ridge tag inside this two-story tower carries a date and a name: Kyōhō 13 (1728), and the master carpenter Araki Jiuemon. The building stands within Sōfukuji, a Chinese Buddhist temple on a hillside in Nagasaki, and it does two jobs at once. The upper floor hangs a bronze temple bell and holds a drum, so a single structure serves as both a bell tower (shōrō) and a drum tower (korō). The Japanese name, shōkorō, simply joins the two.

The frame and the roof tell different stories. The structural columns and joints appear to be the work of Chinese craftsmen, while the gables and roof detailing follow Japanese convention. That split runs through much of Sōfukuji, where Chinese patrons and Japanese builders worked on the same sites for well over a century.

A Temple Built by Nagasaki's Chinese Community

Sōfukuji was founded in 1629 by residents from Fuzhou, in China's Fujian province, who had settled in Nagasaki to trade. They invited a Ming-dynasty monk, Chaoran (read Chōnen in Japanese), to lead it. The temple belongs to the Ōbaku school of Zen, the branch brought to Japan by Chinese monks in the seventeenth century, and it became known locally as Fukushū-ji, the Fuzhou temple.

During the Edo period, when Japan restricted foreign contact, Nagasaki was the one port open to Chinese ships. The Chinese residents there built temples according to their place of origin. Sōfukuji, together with Kōfukuji and Fukusaiji, formed the group known as the three Chinese temples of Nagasaki. These were also places to pray for safe passage, often to Mazu, the sea goddess, whose hall stands within the Sōfukuji grounds.

The bell-drum tower was not the temple's first. An earlier bell tower stood as a two-story hexagonal hall at the south corner of the garden in front of the abbot's quarters. The present site once held only a large iron cauldron. From there the Mazu hall and its gate could be seen by ships in the harbor, and a pair of stone flagpole bases in front of the tower still marks that old sightline. When the new tower went up in 1728, it closed off the view.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The tower was designated an Important Cultural Property on August 29, 1910, under the law that then protected old shrines and temples, and it kept that standing when the present Cultural Properties Protection Law took effect. What makes it worth protecting is not its size but the way two building traditions meet in one structure.

The ridge tag names a Japanese master carpenter, yet the timber framework reads as Chinese work. One account holds that the wood was cut and fitted in China and carried to Nagasaki by trading ship, then raised on site. Whatever the exact sequence, the result is a collaboration rather than a copy, much like the neighboring Gohōdō hall. Few buildings in Japan record that meeting of hands so plainly.

What to Look For

Start with the proportions. The upper and lower stories sit in a balance that reads as solid rather than top-heavy, which is part of why the building feels weighty up close. The lower walls are finished in white plaster, and the rain-exposed timber is painted in vermilion, the same red lead used on the Gohōdō hall beside it.

Look up at the second floor and the openings change. Round windows and flame-shaped katōmado pierce the upper walls more freely than the lower ones do. The reason is practical: opening up the upper level lets the sound of the bell and drum carry out across the grounds.

Smaller details repeat motifs found elsewhere in the temple. The column tops are wrapped in rattan binding, bracket arms are inserted directly into the posts, and a board conceals the rafter ends along the eaves. The gable boards and the carved pendants below them, by contrast, follow Japanese taste, the visible fingerprint of the carpenter named on the ridge tag.

Seeing the Rest of Sōfukuji

The bell-drum tower is one stop among several. Two of the temple's buildings are National Treasures: the Daiyūhōden, the main hall built in 1646 and the oldest surviving building in Nagasaki, and the Daiichihōmon, an inner gate whose dense, layered bracketing has no parallel in the country. The bright red Sanmon gate at the entrance, rebuilt in 1849 and often likened to a dragon-palace gate, is itself an Important Cultural Property, as are the Gohōdō hall and the Masomon gate.

The grounds reward slow looking. Carved bats, peonies, and peach blossoms, all auspicious motifs in China, turn up in odd corners throughout. The temple sits a short climb above the Sōfukuji tram stop, the last stop on Nagasaki's streetcar line 1, roughly twelve minutes from Nagasaki Station. The approach runs up a steep flight of stone steps.

Sōfukuji is open from 8:00 to 17:00. Admission is 300 yen for adults and free for high school students and younger. During the Nagasaki Lantern Festival in early 2026, lanterns returned to the temple for the first time in more than a decade, with extended evening hours during the event.