Shin-Yakushiji Temple South Gate

The Kamakura gate every visitor walks through

The Shin-Yakushiji Temple South Gate (新薬師寺南門, Shin-Yakushiji Nanmon) is a late Kamakura-period gate at the entrance to Shin-Yakushiji in Takabatake, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1901. It is built as a Shikyakumon, or four-legged gate, under a Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof of Hongawarabuki tiles.

Both the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the temple date the Shin-Yakushiji South Gate to the late Kamakura period. It is the temple's front gate, and since visitors enter the grounds through it, it is the first designated building most people see here.

The name describes the structure. Two main posts carry the doors, and four shorter auxiliary posts, two in front and two behind, brace them. Those four are the "legs". The form was used for the principal gates of temples and shrines and carried a certain rank.

Heavier than its date suggests

What sets the Shin-Yakushiji South Gate apart is its weight. The base is laid in rough, unsquared stones, and on it stand four stout posts with broad chamfers cut into their corners. The temple describes the gate as having the solid dignity of a mid-Kamakura gate, even though it was probably built somewhat later.

The chamfers are the thing to check. In Japanese carpentry, the bevel on a square post tends to get narrower as the centuries go on, and a wide bevel makes a post look thicker and older. Run your eye down the corner of one of these posts and you can see why the gate feels a generation older than it is.

The gate also marks a moment in the temple's history. The present layout of Shin-Yakushiji took shape in the Kamakura period, when the South Gate, Belfry and Jizo Hall were built around the surviving Nara-period hall. This gate is the front door the medieval temple gave to its one ancient building.

Outside first, then inside

Start from the lane outside. Through the open doors you see the roof of the main hall, framed by the gable of the gate. That single view sums up the temple's buildings better than any plan.

Under the roof, look down. The rough stone base looks nothing like the neat cut-stone platforms of later gates. Then step up to a post and look at the bevel along its edge, where the tool marks of Kamakura carpenters still catch the light.

Once through, turn around. From the inside you can see the two rear auxiliary posts and how they are tied back to the main posts. From the street your eye goes to the doors; from here the structure of a four-legged gate is easy to read.

Seeing the South Gate

The Shin-Yakushiji South Gate is the temple's working entrance, and every visitor passes through it. It is a building to look at from the outside; there is no interior space open to the public.

Because you pass straight through on the way in, it is easy to miss. Look at it from the lane on the way in and from the grounds on the way out, and you see the same gate from two quite different sides.