Treasure House of Temmukeyama Shrine

An Eighth-Century Log Storehouse Beside the Shrine Gate

The treasury at Tamukeyama Hachimangū is small enough to take in at a glance. Three bays across and two deep, raised off the ground on stout posts, it has walls made of squared timbers laid one atop another like the courses of a log cabin. The building is roughly thirteen hundred years old, and it sits in the open where anyone walking up to the shrine can study it closely.

That accessibility is the surprise. Japan's most celebrated example of this construction, the Shōsōin repository a few minutes' walk away, stands behind a fence and opens its grounds to the public only briefly each autumn. The Tamukeyama storehouse asks for none of that ceremony. It is a working piece of Nara-period carpentry that has simply kept standing.

From Tōdai-ji's Oil Store to a Shrine Treasury

The building did not begin its life here. It was originally part of the abura-gura, the oil-storage complex that supplied Tōdai-ji with the lamp oil burned in its halls. Records place it among a group of storehouses near the temple's old refectory, northeast of the Great Buddha Hall, where it served as one of the jōshi-gura attached to the oil office. The administration of that oil store was no minor matter: it collected dues, managed surplus rice, and at times bought and worked farmland on the temple's behalf.

In 1714, during the mid-Edo period, the storehouse was dismantled and moved to its present spot at Tamukeyama Hachimangū. The shrine itself had long been bound to Tōdai-ji as its guardian deity, so the transfer kept the building within the same religious orbit it had always belonged to. Today it is sometimes called the shinpōden, the hall of sacred treasures.

Why It Is Designated

The storehouse was registered as an Important Cultural Property on 14 November 1953. Its value lies in what it preserves: an intact example of azekura log construction from the Nara period, a building method that has almost entirely vanished from everyday architecture.

In azekura work, the wall is not a frame filled with panels but a stack of long timbers, each cut with a triangular or squared cross-section and laid so that one edge faces outward. The ends interlock at the corners in the manner of a well-curb, and the stacked timbers form the wall itself. The method was widespread in the eighth century and is bound up with the image of the imperial Shōsōin, yet very few original examples survive. Counting this storehouse, the nearby sutra repository of Tōdai-ji's Hokkedō, and the Shōsōin, the list of Nara-period log buildings in the city is short.

What to Look For

Stand close and the construction explains itself. You can follow each timber as it runs the length of the wall and locks into the next at the corner, the grain and the seams fully exposed. The structure measures about six metres along the front and four metres deep, and rises only some four metres in height, so the whole building reads clearly from a single vantage point.

Two details reward a second look. The roof is a hipped form covered in formal round-and-flat tiling, and its ridge carries shibi, the upturned ornaments more often seen crowning a major temple hall than a storehouse. The raised floor, lifting the timber box well clear of the damp ground, is the same principle that kept treasures dry inside repositories of this kind for centuries.

For comparison, walk north toward the Hokkedō. The Lotus Hall's own log sutra repository is close in age, scale, and form, and seeing the two within a single visit makes the shared logic of Nara-period storehouse design easy to read.

The Shrine and the Neighbourhood

Tamukeyama Hachimangū was founded in 749, when the deity of Usa Hachimangū in present-day Ōita was invited to Nara to watch over Tōdai-ji and its newly cast Great Buddha. The shrine stood in several locations before Hōjō Tokiyori settled it at the foot of Tamukeyama in 1250. Its present main hall dates from 1691. Among its holdings is a Kamakura-period ceremonial horse saddle, the karakura, designated a National Treasure, along with masks used in court dance.

The hill behind the shrine has been famous for its autumn colour for more than a thousand years. The scholar-poet Sugawara no Michizane wrote of offering the brocade of Tamukeyama's maple leaves to the gods, and the verse still attaches the place to the season. The storehouse stands a short walk east of Tōdai-ji's Great Buddha Hall, beside the Hokkedō and Nigatsu-dō, within the band of monuments that make this corner of Nara Park a World Heritage landscape. A circuit taking in the Daibutsuden, the Hokkedō, and the deer-filled park can fold in the storehouse with almost no detour.