Tomi Shrine Worship Hall

A building with no walls at the foot of the steps

Tomi Shrine Worship Hall (登彌神社拝殿, Tomi Jinja Haiden) is a timber worship hall at Tomi Shrine in Ishikicho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, dating from about 1799 and entered in the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 3 April 2020. It stands at the centre of the precinct, at the foot of the stone steps that climb to the main hall.

It measures 3 bays by 2 bays, with an Irimoya-zukuri hipped-and-gabled roof laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles and a floor area of 31 square metres. What defines it is what was left out. Nothing fills the spaces between the columns: no walls, no fittings, no doors. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database describes it as built open, without any infill between the posts.

The floor is planked. No ceiling was fitted, so the underside of the roof is finished as Keshō-yaneura, with the rafters themselves serving as the surface you see. A Kirime-en veranda runs around all four sides, with a Kōran balustrade outside it. There is almost no ornament. Even so, this arrangement alone does the job the building exists for, which is to hold a space for worship in front of the main hall.

Kagura stage, or worship hall?

Two accounts of the origin of Tomi Shrine Worship Hall sit side by side.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database calls it a worship hall said to be a converted former kagura stage, and dates it to about 1799 with alterations in 1939. Nara City's page reports that the building is held to date from 1799 and that it was taken apart and reworked in 1939, without mentioning a kagura stage at all.

The two are not in conflict. A building put up around 1799 could have been reworked into a worship hall by the 1939 campaign, and both statements would hold. When the change of role happened, or whether the building served as a worship hall from the start, cannot be settled from published sources, so this article leaves the question open.

1939 is the year Tomi Shrine rose from village rank to prefectural rank. The other buildings in the precinct were put in order around the same date, which places the alteration of the worship hall within that campaign. Its registration number is 29-0283 and the criterion applied was "a contribution to the historical landscape of the nation."

What looking up reveals

The thing worth studying at Tomi Shrine Worship Hall is overhead. With no ceiling boards, a look inside from the veranda takes in the whole plane of rafters running at a slope. Structure and finish are the same members. Boarding it over would have taken less work, but it would also have removed the height and depth that the open frame gives.

The effect of leaving the bays empty shows itself when you stand in front. From the approach, the stone steps and the main hall behind read as one continuous line straight through the building. Nothing blocks the view. A pantiled roof stretching horizontally, with air underneath, is exactly the pause a visitor needs before climbing.

The balustrade on the veranda is low, and the line of its rail pulls the outline of the building sideways. Built of unpainted timber and grey tile, with no colour at all, it sets off the red-painted main hall behind it.

Visiting Tomi Shrine Worship Hall

Tomi Shrine Worship Hall can be examined freely from outside. Because it has no walls, the planked floor and the exposed roof frame are both visible from the ground. Stepping up onto the building is not normally expected, so the view is from below the veranda looking up.

To see the hall doing the work it was built for, come at dawn on 1 February. The Tsutsugayu gruel divination is performed here: bamboo tubes boiled in gruel are split open to read the coming year's harvest. Worshippers gather all around the building that morning, which makes it a poor day for studying the architecture quietly. The date to choose depends on which of the two you want.

Nothing on the shrine's website restricts photography, though during the rite a word at the shrine office first is the safer course. Directions and the conditions for visiting the precinct are set out on the Tomi Shrine page.