Chogakuji Temple Tower Gate

A Gate With a Bell Inside It

Chogakuji Romon (長岳寺楼門, also written Chōgaku-ji Rōmon), the two-storey gate of Chogakuji temple in Yanagimoto-cho, Tenri City, Nara Prefecture, was designated an Important Cultural Property on 28 August 1907, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns its upper storey to the late Heian period and its lower storey to the Momoyama period. Very few gates in Japan carry a dating spread that wide between top and bottom.

In technical terms the building is an ikken ikko romon: a two-storey gate one bay wide, with a single doorway passing through it. The roof is irimoya, the hipped-and-gabled profile that flares outward at the four lower corners, and it is finished in kokerabuki, thin wooden shingles laid in overlapping courses instead of tile. Shingled roofs weather to a soft grey and read very differently from the hard black ceramic surfaces of most Nara temple gates.

Stop under the doorway and look straight up. The upper storey has no walls. It measures three bays by two and stands open on all four sides, an arrangement the Tenri municipal cultural properties division describes as unusual. A temple bell once hung in that open chamber, which is why local usage calls the building a shoromon (鐘楼門), a gate doing double duty as a belfry, rather than a plain romon.

Most Japanese temple compounds put the bell in a freestanding belfry off to one side of the courtyard. Folding both functions into the entrance changes how the building was used: anyone striking the bell had to climb into the gate itself, directly above the heads of everyone walking through.

Two Centuries Apart, One Building

The 1907 designation came under the Ancient Shrines and Temples Preservation Law, the framework behind Japan's first systematic register of protected architecture. Chogakuji holds four nationally designated buildings along with five designated Buddhist sculptures, a density unusual for a temple this quiet.

What the designation protects is a survivor. Chogakuji burned more than once. Temple records summarised by the Tenri city history describe the compound catching fire during the Onin War and again in the second month of Bunki 3 (1503) during regional fighting. Before those losses the grounds held a five-storey pagoda, a sutra repository, a treasury, and forty-two subtemple quarters. Almost none of it survives.

The gate does, and this is where the dating turns interesting. Temple tradition holds that Kukai founded Chogakuji in the sixth month of Tencho 1 (824) at the wish of Emperor Junna, and that the gate stands as he built it. The Tenri city cultural properties page repeats the claim more cautiously, saying the gate is said to date from the foundation while the lower storey shows repair work in Kamakura and Muromachi styles. The Agency for Cultural Affairs is blunter: upper storey 1086 to 1184, lower storey 1573 to 1614. Late Heian falls roughly two and a half centuries after Kukai died in 835.

The reasonable reading is that the upper chamber preserves genuinely early fabric, that the lower storey was rebuilt after one of the fires, and that the founding story attached itself over time to the oldest thing still standing. The temple and Nara tourism bodies both describe the structure as the oldest surviving bell-gate in Japan. That claim depends on how narrowly the category is drawn, and it is better treated as a firmly established local tradition than as a settled architectural fact.

Either way, the upper storey is old. Late Heian timber that has stayed in continuous use through six centuries of fire, warfare, the confiscation of temple lands under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the anti-Buddhist campaigns of the early Meiji years is not a common thing to walk beneath.

Walking Through It

The gate is not a building you view from a distance. It is the way in. Visitors pass the outer great gate, follow a gravelled approach hedged on both sides with clipped Hirado azaleas, and arrive at the romon. Beyond it the ground opens onto the release pond and the main hall, the latter completed in the eighth month of Tenmei 3 (1783) after its predecessor burned during the Eiroku era.

Chogakuji opens daily from 9:00 to 17:00 with no closing days. Admission runs 400 yen for adults, 350 yen for university and high school students, 300 yen for junior high students, and 250 yen for elementary students, with children below school age admitted free and a 50 yen per person reduction for groups of thirty or more. Photography in the grounds and of the gate is unrestricted. The interior of the main hall, where the hell paintings hang, is not photographable.

Timing rewards planning. The azaleas along the approach flower from late April into early May. Autumn colour peaks between the middle and end of November, and Chogakuji appears on the national list of one hundred maple-viewing sites. From 23 October to the end of November the temple displays the original of its large hell painting, attributed to Kano Sanraku and measuring roughly eleven metres by four; a reproduction hangs the rest of the year. On Saturdays and Sundays during that window the resident priest gives a narrated reading of the painting at 13:00.

Reaching the temple takes a little effort, which is part of why the compound stays quiet. From JR Yanagimoto Station the walk is about one kilometre, twenty minutes on foot. Buses from Tenri Station reach the Kaminagaoka stop in around ten minutes, leaving a five to ten minute walk. Drivers come south from the Tenri interchange of the Nishi-Meihan Expressway, roughly six kilometres along Route 169. The Yamanobe-no-michi, often called Japan's oldest road, runs directly past the temple, and walkers on that route arrive at Chogakuji at about the midpoint between Tenri and Sakurai.