Sofukuji Temple Guardian Hall (Kuandi Hall and Kannon Hall)

Sōfukuji Gohōdō: The Hall Where Three Different Powers Share One Roof

Walk into the Gohōdō at Sōfukuji and you find three figures who almost never keep each other's company. Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, sits at the center. To the right is Guan Yu, the loyal general of China's Three Kingdoms, worshipped here as a protective deity. To the left runs Idaten, the swift guardian who, in legend, chased down a demon to recover the Buddha's stolen relics. One Buddhist bodhisattva, one deified Chinese soldier, and one Indian-derived guardian, all under a single tiled roof.

The hall was built in 1731 by craftsmen from China, and it sits inside Sōfukuji, the oldest of Nagasaki's surviving Chinese temples. Because of who lives inside, the building answers to several names: Kannon Hall, Kantei Hall (after Guan Yu, read Kantei in Japanese), and Heavenly Kings Hall. The name in official use, Gohōdō, comes from a plaque reading Gohōzō hung above the entrance, brushed by the Ōbaku monk Sokuhi Nyoitsu.

A Chinese Temple in a Japanese Port

To understand the hall, it helps to understand the temple around it. Sōfukuji was founded in 1629 by Fujianese merchants living in Nagasaki, who invited a monk named Chōnen from Fuzhou to lead it. During the years when Christianity was banned and foreign contact was funneled through this one port, the Chinese community built temples partly to demonstrate that they were Buddhists, not Christians. Sōfukuji became the gathering place for people from the Fuzhou region, and the temple is still sometimes called Fukushūji, the "Fuzhou temple."

The temple belongs to the Ōbaku school of Zen, introduced to Japan by the monk Ingen, who arrived in 1654 and stayed at Sōfukuji for two months the following year. Ōbaku architecture looks unlike anything else in Japan because it was, quite literally, imported. Timbers were cut in China and shipped to Nagasaki to be assembled. The result is a compound painted in deep red, decorated with peonies and bats and other Chinese motifs, built in the style of the late Ming and early Qing periods.

The Gohōdō stands across a stone courtyard from the Daiyūhōden, the main hall and a National Treasure. The two buildings face each other, and that facing relationship turns out to be central to how the Gohōdō came to look the way it does.

Why It Is Protected, and What Makes It Unusual

The Gohōdō was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1910. Its value lies in being a rare, well-preserved example of Ōbaku temple architecture, and in the way it records a meeting of two building traditions.

Look at the frame and the roof separately and you see two different hands at work. The structural body was clearly made by Chinese carpenters, while the roofline follows Japanese temple convention, which suggests the building was a collaboration. The floor plan is odd for a Buddha hall. Its column spacing resembles the layout of a Tennōden, the Hall of the Heavenly Kings found in Ōbaku temples such as Manpukuji near Uji and Shōfukuji in Nagasaki. In a true Tennōden, Budai (the Maitreya figure) and Idaten are placed back to back at the center, and visitors pass straight through the building as if through a gate.

That is what the Chinese builders seem to have planned here. The sloping ground made a walk-through central gate impossible, so the design was changed into an ordinary Buddha hall that faces the main hall instead. Kannon, originally enshrined in the meditation hall, took the central seat, with Guan Yu and Idaten to either side. The building you see is, in a sense, a Tennōden that could not become one.

What to Look For Up Close

Start at floor level, with the stone pedestals under the columns. Carved into them in low relief are lions, deer, the mythical kirin, and plum blossoms, the work of Chinese stone carvers and easy to miss if you keep your eyes on the altar.

Above, the building speaks fluent Ōbaku. Fan-shaped rafters spread out at the eaves. Rattan binding wraps the tops of the columns. Bracket arms are inserted directly into the posts rather than stacked in the Japanese manner, and the doors are built as half-doors. The ceiling follows the curved Ōbaku form. None of this vocabulary appears in ordinary Japanese temple halls, which is part of why people travel here.

Then there is Guan Yu's face. A scar on the statue's right cheek carries a story worth knowing before you arrive. Offerings of food and sweets left before the image kept being eaten by mice. One day Sokuhi Nyoitsu, the monk who brushed the hall's plaque, scolded the statue for allowing this and struck its right cheek, chipping the lacquer. The next morning a mouse lay pierced by Idaten's sword, as though the general had ordered the guardian to deal with the problem. Regretting his outburst, Sokuhi had the cheek repaired, but the story says the lacquer would not hold, peeling away no matter how often it was applied. The mark is said to remain.

Around the Temple

The Gohōdō is one stop on a short circuit through one of Japan's most concentrated collections of Chinese-style architecture. Of the six National Treasure buildings in Kyushu, two stand in this compound: the Daiippōmon, a four-legged gate of 1644 whose components were prefabricated in China, and the Daiyūhōden of 1646, whose lower story is Chinese in style while the upper draws on Japanese forms. Four more structures here are Important Cultural Properties, among them the bright red Sanmon gate of 1849, often likened to the gate of a dragon palace, and the bell-and-drum tower of 1728.

The temple sits at the southern edge of Nagasaki's Teramachi district, a street lined with temples that makes for an easy afternoon of walking. The Chinatown of Nagasaki and the lantern-lit festivals of late winter are both a short distance away.

Practical notes: the temple opens daily from 8:00 to 17:00, and admission is collected at the gate (300 yen for adults at the time of writing). The site involves a steep stone staircase from the entrance, so flat shoes help.