Shin-Yakushiji Temple Belfry

A skirted belfry beside the main hall

The Shin-Yakushiji Temple Belfry (新薬師寺鐘楼, Shin-Yakushiji Shōrō) is an early Kamakura-period bell tower at Shin-Yakushiji in Takabatake, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1898. It is three bays by two, with a flared plastered "skirt" enclosing the lower level and an Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable roof covered in Hongawarabuki tiles.

It stands in front of the main hall and to the right as you walk up from the South Gate. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the early Kamakura period, and the temple places it among the buildings put up in the Kamakura era, when the South Gate, the Jizo Hall and this belfry gave the grounds their present form.

Of the four Kamakura buildings at Shin-Yakushiji, the Belfry was the first to be protected, just a year after the main hall and very early in the life of Japan's national system for preserving old temples and shrines.

What the skirt is for

Japanese temple belfries come in two basic forms. The open type is simply four posts with the bell hanging from the roof frame. The other type wraps the lower storey in a wall that splays outward toward the ground, like a pleated skirt; this is the hakamagoshi, named after the wide trousers called hakama. The bell hangs in the upper storey, and the lower storey becomes an enclosed base.

The temple singles out the Shin-Yakushiji Belfry's hakamagoshi as a rare example. The skirt is finished in white plaster, with bracketing and the tiled roof above it. Because the main hall just behind has the same white walls and grey tiles, the two buildings, several centuries apart, read almost as a matched pair.

The Agency's database has no descriptive text for this building, only its date and form. Even so, the form entry spells out "with hakamagoshi", which tells you what defines it.

A bell older than its tower

The bronze bell in the upper storey is older than the building that holds it. The temple dates it to the Tenpyō era of the eighth century, and it is designated an Important Cultural Property in its own right. A Kamakura tower, in other words, carries a bell several hundred years its senior.

The temple identifies it as the bell made famous by a tale in the Nihon Ryōiki, Japan's oldest collection of Buddhist miracle stories, in which the enormously strong Dōjō Hōshi fights off a demon that haunts a bell tower. There is no independent record here to test that identification, and the article repeats it as the temple tells it. What can be said is that an eighth-century bell still hangs in front of an eighth-century hall, at a temple that has otherwise lost most of what it once had.

Seeing the Belfry

The Shin-Yakushiji Belfry is viewed from outside; the interior is not open. It stands just inside the South Gate on the right, so you pass close by on the way to the main hall.

The flare of the skirt shows best from an angle rather than straight on. From just inside the gate, looking ahead and to the right, the slope of the hakamagoshi, the hip-and-gable roof and the main hall's roof behind it line up in one view. The bell hangs inside the upper storey, so step back and look up at the openings rather than standing directly underneath.