Former Fukiji Temple Rakando

A Heian Building That Moved Twice

The Former Fukiji Arhat Hall (旧富貴寺羅漢堂, Kyū-Fukiji Rakandō) is a small single-bay hall standing within the precincts of Hōryū-ji in Ikaruga Town, Ikoma District, Nara Prefecture, built from timbers of the late Heian period and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 28 December 1971.

It is the only nationally designated building at Hōryū-ji that arrived from somewhere else, and the route it took is unusual enough to be worth setting out in order.

The hall began at Fukiji in Hoda, Kawanishi Town, in the western Nara Basin. That temple still exists and its main hall is an Important Cultural Property in its own right. Note that this Fukiji has no connection with the better-known temple of the same written name in Ōita Prefecture, whose Great Hall is a National Treasure.

What stood in the Fukiji precinct was understood to be the surviving ground storey of a three-storey pagoda whose upper two levels had been lost. By the 1930s the remains were scarcely a building at all. Pillars, head tie-beams and bracket complexes were left; everything else had gone.

In 1935 the marquis Hosokawa Moritatsu, head of the Higo Hosokawa house and a serious collector and student of art, took the surviving members into his care, had them dismantled, and stored them in the warehouse of his Tokyo residence. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building simply as having been dismantled and held in storage from that year.

They stayed in Tokyo for over three decades. In 1969 Hosokawa presented 207 members to Hōryū-ji, and the architectural historian Ōoka Minoru prepared the drawings for putting them back together.

Rot, Chemistry, and What Counts as Original

The members that came out of the warehouse were in bad condition. Long storage had done what long storage does to untreated wood, and the decay was severe enough to raise the question of reuse at all. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states that chemical treatment carried out by the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties made the timbers usable again. Style analysis placed them in the Heian period, and the Agency assigns the building a date range of 1086 to 1184.

What went back up in the Hōryū-ji precinct is therefore a particular kind of object. The pillars and bracket sets are Heian. The podium, the secondary fittings and the roof had all been lost, and were supplied new during the reconstruction. The registered form is a hall one bay square, single-storeyed, with a pyramidal hōgyō roof and a covering of cypress bark. The pagoda's ground storey was rebuilt as a freestanding hall and took the name Rakandō, hall of the arhats, which is how it entered the national register in 1971 as the Former Fukiji Arhat Hall.

Some visitors will find this uncomfortable, and the discomfort is reasonable. A designation normally attaches to a building that has stood where it stands. This one attaches to a set of authentic twelfth-century members reassembled into a new configuration in a new place in the early 1970s, with roughly half the fabric supplied fresh. Japanese practice of that period accepted such work when the alternative was the total loss of the surviving material, and the record does not disguise what was done. The Agency's own commentary lists the podium, the fittings and the roof as newly made. Reading that sentence is part of understanding the building.

One small detail rewards attention in the national record. The Agency's text gives the hall's origin as Hoda in Kawanishi village, Shiki District, using the municipal designation current when the entry was written rather than the town status Kawanishi holds today. The commentary also speaks of the reconstruction in the present tense, as something just completed. These entries were drafted at the moment of designation and were never updated, which makes them small time capsules of 1971.

Where It Stands, and Why You Cannot See It

The hall occupies a spot most Hōryū-ji visitors walk past without knowing it. It sits on the south side of the path that runs from the West Precinct to the East Precinct, inside the earthen tsuiji wall. Anyone crossing between the Golden Hall and the Yumedono passes within a short distance of it.

Passing is as close as you will get. The hall is not open to the public, and it is screened by the wall rather than displayed along the path. Visitors should not plan a trip to Hōryū-ji expecting to view it, and should not go looking for a way in. Treat it as a piece of context that makes the walk between the two precincts more interesting rather than as a destination.

For the visit itself, Hōryū-ji charges a single combined admission covering the West Precinct, the Great Treasure Gallery and the East Precinct. Under the schedule revised on 1 March 2025 this is 2,000 yen for adults, university and high school students, 1,700 yen for junior high school students and 1,000 yen for elementary school students. Opening hours run from 8:00 to 17:00 between 22 February and 3 November, and from 8:00 to 16:30 between 4 November and 21 February, with reception closing thirty minutes before the gates. Rates and hours change, so confirm with the temple before travelling.

Getting there: Hōryūji Station on the JR Yamatoji Line is about twenty minutes on foot, or a short bus ride to the Hōryūji-monzen stop. Allow at least ninety minutes for the precinct as a whole, and two hours if you intend to look properly at the Great Treasure Gallery. Photography outdoors is generally permitted, though many hall interiors are not open to cameras, and posted restrictions should be followed.

The better way to engage with this particular building is to make the pairing. Fukiji in Kawanishi Town is about an hour away by train and foot, and its own main hall, an Important Cultural Property of 1388, still stands beside Mutsugata Shrine. Seeing the place the timbers left, and knowing they now sit behind a wall at Hōryū-ji, gives the hall a presence that a fenced-off roofline on its own cannot.