Horyuji Temple Wife's Chamber

Hōryūji Tsumamuro: A Heian-Period Dormitory for Serving Monks

Walk east past the Shōryōin at Hōryūji and you come to a long, low building that most visitors pass without a second glance. This is the Tsumamuro, a monks' dormitory put up around 1121, late in the Heian period. It runs twenty-seven bays from one end to the other, close to 51 metres, yet measures only two bays, about four metres, in depth. The proportions tell you the purpose: this was a place to live and sleep, not a hall built to impress.

The name reads "the chamber at the gable end." In Japanese carpentry the tsuma is the triangular gable face of a roof, and the building took its name from where it stood, alongside the larger East Dormitory. Plainness is the whole character of the place.

A Place for the Monks Who Served

A large temple in the Nara and Heian periods was also a residence. Monks lived in long buildings called sōbō, dormitories set around the precinct where the lecture hall and refectory stood. Hōryūji's West Precinct had two such buildings side by side. The East Dormitory, the Higashimuro, housed the senior, ranking priests; it survives today as a National Treasure with timbers reaching back to the eighth century. The Tsumamuro, just to its east, housed the attendant monks who served those priests.

A typhoon in 1110 wrecked part of the Higashimuro, and the rebuilding that followed in 1121 is the date usually given for the present Tsumamuro as well. The interior was divided into living quarters three bays wide, the same unit repeated down the full length of the building like a row of identical rooms. Each unit had a partition reaching in one bay from the outer wall, with doorways on either side, so a person could pass from one room to the next along the inside.

The building was repaired in 1246. Centuries of patching followed, and in 1962 it was taken apart and reassembled close to how it had looked after that 1246 work, reusing the surviving old members wherever they could be kept.

Why a Plain Dormitory Was Designated

The Tsumamuro became an Important Cultural Property on 26 June 1942. The reason has little to do with grandeur. Dormitories were working buildings, replaced or lost far more often than the halls that held the images, and few Heian examples remain anywhere in Japan. The Tsumamuro is one of them, and standing beside the Higashimuro it preserves the everyday geography of a medieval monastery: where the senior priests slept, where their attendants slept, and how close together the two ranks actually lived.

The construction is as direct as the plan. There are no bracket complexes of the kind that crown the Kondō and pagoda nearby. The eaves are single, the rafters set wide apart, and the gable face carries only a central post braced by a pair of diagonal struts, a detail carpenters call sasu. Inside there is no ceiling. You look straight up to the underside of the roof, a finish known as keshō yaneura, where the structure itself is left on view. The outer pillars are round; only the posts marking the inner partitions are squared.

What to Look For

The first thing to do is simply to take in the length. Stand at one end and sight down the line of bays as they repeat toward the far gable. That rhythm of identical units is the architectural record of communal life, one chamber after another for monk after monk.

Then look at the gable ends. After the carved struts and bracketing of the great halls, the bare triangle of the Tsumamuro's pediment reads almost as a relief, a reminder that most of a working monastery looked like this rather than like its showpieces. The interior is not open to visitors, so the view is from outside; the wide, low sweep of the tiled roof and the unbroken run of mud-plaster wall are best read from a few steps back.

Around the West Precinct

The Tsumamuro sits among a cluster of buildings on the eastern side of the West Precinct, and you pass them on the way between the central halls and the eastern grounds. Right beside it is the Shōryōin, a National Treasure formed in 1284 from the southern part of the Higashimuro and dedicated to Prince Shōtoku; this is also where the temple issues its goshuin seals. Its annual Oeshiki memorial rites run from 22 to 24 March. A few steps on stands the Kōfūzō, a Nara-period raised storehouse, also a National Treasure, and beyond it the Jikidō refectory.

Hōryūji is about a twenty-minute walk from JR Hōryūji Station, with buses also running to the Hōryūji-mae and Hōryūji-sandō stops. A single combined ticket, bought at the West Precinct entrance, covers the West Precinct, the Daihōzōin treasure galleries, and the East Precinct with its Yumedono. The grounds open at 8:00, closing at 17:00 from late February through early November and at 16:30 in the colder months, with last entry half an hour before. The whole compound forms part of the "Buddhist Monuments in the Hōryū-ji Area," inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1993.