Tomi Shrine Main Hall

Two structures counted as one hall

Tomi Shrine Main Hall (登彌神社本殿, Tomi Jinja Honden) is a late Edo period shrine building at Tomi Shrine in Ishikicho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, built in 1824 and entered in the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 3 April 2020. It stands at the far end of the precinct, on the highest terrace, facing south.

It is not one building. Two structures of identical size and design, each in the single-bay Kasuga-zukuri form with a Hiwadabuki roof, stand side by side east and west, joined along their rear by a wall and a plank floor. Nara City's account adds that a large gutter runs between the two roofs and that the floor laid beneath it forms an ainoma, an intervening space. Two roofs, a valley between them, and a continuous floor below. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database calls the arrangement unusual.

The date is firm because the Munafuda ridge tablet survives; the shrine records it as dated the tenth day of the eleventh month of 1824. For registration purposes the two structures count as a single building, and the recorded floor area is 20 square metres. A veranda runs across the front and along the sides of each, with a Hama-en skirting the outer edge.

The western structure holds Kamimusubi, Tomi no Nigihayahi and Amenokoyane; the eastern one Takamimusubi and Homudawake. Two sets of deities of different character, kept apart and yet housed as one building. The unusual form follows from that arrangement rather than from any wish to be unusual.

The only one of the five listed as a model of design

The five buildings registered at Tomi Shrine went onto the register on the same day, under consecutive numbers. The criterion applied was not the same for all of them. Tomi Shrine Main Hall carries registration number 29-0282 and qualified as "a model of design." The worship hall, sacred food offering hall, purification pavilion and shrine office qualified as "a contribution to the historical landscape of the nation."

Japan's registration system uses three criteria. The first, the one applied here, means that the building works as a model of its type. That is a different claim from saying a building helps a precinct look coherent.

Two features earned Tomi Shrine Main Hall that assessment: the way the pair is joined, and the paintwork. Single-bay kasuga-zukuri halls are common enough across the Nara basin, but setting two of them side by side and linking them through an intervening space is not. And the framing is painted: bengara, an iron oxide red, over the structural members, with the columns wrapped in a woven brocade pattern and the Kumimono bracket sets picked out in full polychrome. A small building carrying most of the painter's repertoire of its period.

How to read the colour

Colour is what rewards attention at Tomi Shrine Main Hall, with one qualification: what you see is not 1824 paint left untouched. The shrine records that repair work on the main hall was completed in September 2015, when the cypress-bark roof was renewed and the polychrome restored. You are looking at a surface about ten years old.

The red is bengara, a pigment based on iron oxide. It covers the faces of columns and horizontal members evenly, and green, blue and white enter above it in the details of the bracket sets and carvings. The brocade wrapping on the columns imitates patterned textile bound around the shaft. Since visitors cannot approach closely, the pattern itself stays hard to read. What can be read is the area the red occupies and where the other colours cut into it.

From the top of the stone steps, beside the worship hall, the roof and painted framing of the main hall appear on the terrace above. Morning puts the sun behind the viewer and separates the colours; on an overcast day the brown of the bark roof and the red of the bengara sink to almost the same value.

Visiting Tomi Shrine Main Hall

Tomi Shrine Main Hall is not open inside, and the building cannot be entered. Viewing means the exterior only, and its position at the back and top of the precinct adds a second constraint: the worship hall stands in front of it. There is no clear head-on line of sight. In practice you move to the side of the worship hall and look up at an angle.

To confirm that there really are two structures, stand off the central axis rather than on it. The two roofs then separate in depth, and the valley between them marks where the intervening space lies. Seen straight on, they read as a single roof.

Nothing on the shrine's website restricts photography of the exterior. During ceremonies, however, worshippers gather in front of the worship hall, and a word at the shrine office before photographing is the safer course. Directions, parking and the conditions for visiting the precinct are set out on the Tomi Shrine page.