Saion-in Agetsuchimon

A Gate Form With Two Survivors

Saion-in Agetsuchimon (西園院上土門, also written Saionin Agetsuchimon and read Saion-in Agetsuchimon), the earth-topped gate of the Saion-in quarters at Hōryū-ji in Ikaruga, Ikoma District, Nara Prefecture, is an early Edo-period gate designated an Important Cultural Property on 22 December 1942.

The national register describes it in six words: one bay, agetsuchimon type, cypress-bark roof. The dating is given as the early Edo period, roughly 1615 to 1660. Behind that compressed entry sits a gate form that almost vanished.

An agetsuchimon works like this. Two round pillars carry a horizontal beam, the kabuki. Above it, paired beams called onobari and menobari take the load of a roof that is nearly flat, closer to a deck than to the pitched roofs on every other building at Hōryū-ji. Earth was then heaped along the top of that flat deck in a low ridge, shaped like a half-cylinder, and this mound of earth, not the timber beneath it, gave the roof its slope and shed the rain. Boards at each gable end held the earth from sliding out. Those boards are called eburi-ita, written either 絵振板 or 柄振板 depending on the source.

The form appears constantly in medieval picture scrolls, where it marks the entrances of aristocratic residences. In the hierarchy of gates it ranked immediately below the four-legged shikyakumon, and it was used at the main gates of imperial princely houses, monzeki temples headed by members of the nobility, court families, and the residential quarters of major temples. Saion-in, as the abbot's compound of Hōryū-ji, was precisely the kind of address that warranted one.

Why the Gate Is Designated, and Why the Roof Is Wrong

Look up at this gate today and there is no earth on it. The roof is laid with cypress bark, hiwada, in overlapping courses. That is not a mistake or a modern shortcut. As the form moved into the early modern period, builders began substituting cypress bark for the earth mound while keeping everything else, the low pitch, the flat deck beneath, the boards at the gables. The register records the gate as an agetsuchimon and records the roof as cypress bark in the same line, without treating this as a contradiction. The type is defined by its structure, and the surface finish followed the fashion of the day.

The designation was made on 22 December 1942 under register number 01042, the same day the Saion-in Kyakuden was designated as 01041. The Karamon standing immediately to the right of this gate was designated separately on 9 June 1943, and the rammed-earth walls extending left and right were designated as the Hōryū-ji Sai-in Seinan-sumi Shiin Chikugaki in two structures. The whole frontage of Saion-in is protected.

What makes the gate matter is arithmetic. Surviving agetsuchimon can be counted on one hand, and the count usually stops at two. The second is the west gate of Hōrin-ji, a prefecturally designated structure standing a short distance to the northeast in the same town. That gate was dismantled and repaired in 1979 and came back with a different roof covering, retaining its eburi-ita boards and their supports. That leaves the Saion-in gate as the reference example, the one that a student of medieval residential architecture goes to in order to see how the form was actually built.

One further detail from the register is easy to skim past. The Kyakuden behind this gate is classified as residential architecture, while the gate in front of it is classified under temple architecture. The two categories run through a single compound, and this gate stands on the boundary, a residential form serving a monastic address.

How to Read the Gate on Site

This one is easy to visit. Saion-in occupies the southwest block of the Western Precinct, and its east wall faces the path running north from the Great South Gate. The gate is on that wall, about fifty metres in, on your left. The path is outside the ticket booth, so nothing needs to be bought to stand in front of it. Facing east, the gate takes direct light in the morning.

Step under the opening and look up. The ceiling is boarded, plainly, with none of the bracketing that fills the gates of the main precinct. Then step back and look at the gable. The board fixed there has an outline something like a kaerumata, the frog-leg strut of temple architecture, and that is the eburi-ita, sitting where earth was once retained. Very few gates in Japan carry that piece.

From behind, two support posts stand clear of the main pillars and take the beam. The roof framing above is unusual, but the arrangement of posts and beams reads close to a yakuimon, the doctor's gate common in samurai residences.

Then compare it with the Karamon a few paces to the right. Both are early Edo, both are Important Cultural Properties, both are roofed in cypress bark, and their profiles could hardly differ more. The Karamon has the double curve of a plain karamon roof, with carving at the ends of its kabuki and on the gable pendant. The Agetsuchimon has a flat line and a boarded gable, and no carving to speak of. Two gates, one wall, and the entire vocabulary of early Edo gate rank set out side by side.

Practical points. The temple grounds cost nothing to enter, and the combined ticket for the Western Precinct, the Great Treasure Hall and the Eastern Precinct is 2,000 yen for adults, 1,700 yen for middle school students and 1,000 yen for elementary school students. None of those areas include Saion-in, whose Kyakuden and Shindō are both closed. Opening hours are 8:00 to 17:00 from 22 February to 3 November and 8:00 to 16:30 from 4 November to 21 February, with entry closing thirty minutes before the gates. JR Hōryūji Station is about 1.3 kilometres away, roughly twenty minutes on foot, or five minutes by bus to the Hōryūji Monzen stop. Exterior photography along the path is generally tolerated while interiors and temple treasures are not, and the posted signs govern.