Honkoji Temple Wall

A Wall on the National Register

Honkoji Hei (本光寺塀, also written Honkō-ji Hei), the boundary wall of Honkoji temple in Sawane Kagomachi, Sado City, Niigata Prefecture, was built in the closing decades of the Edo period and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 March 2008. It runs east and west from the temple's main gate along Prefectural Route 45, with a total registered length of 14 metres.

Walls are registered less often than halls and gates, and the reason this one was listed is set out in the criterion applied to it: contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Taken alone, a length of plastered wall is a modest thing. Taken with the gate it flanks, it is the element that gathers the temple into a single continuous frontage on the road, and without it the compound would read as a building standing in an open lot.

Honkoji is a Jodo Shinshu temple whose founding is placed in 1603, and which reached this site in 1781 after moving three times. Four of its structures were registered on the same day: the main hall, the bell tower, the gate of 1846, and this wall.

Stone Below, Plaster Above

The construction is worth taking slowly, because the wall changes material as it rises.

The lowest metre is tuff, a soft volcanic stone quarried locally and easily cut, laid as a base that keeps the timber out of the snow and the salt air off the frame. On top of it sits a wooden sill, then posts, then penetrating ties running horizontally between them. The panels are finished in white lime plaster and left as shinkabe, meaning the posts stay visible on the surface rather than being buried under the plaster. Above, short cantilevered arms called udegi carry a purlin, the purlin supports a boarded eave, and the eave is roofed with pantiles.

The total height comes to about two metres, so the stone base accounts for roughly half of it. That proportion is unusual and gives the wall a heavier footing than the plastered walls one sees around temples on the mainland. It is also a sensible response to a coastal site on the Japan Sea, where winter driving snow and wind-blown salt punish anything wooden near ground level.

Two Unequal Arms, and a Road That Moved Them

The wall is not symmetrical. Measured along its folds, the eastern arm runs 9.0 metres and the western arm 4.8 metres, which is what produces the registered figure of roughly 14 metres in total. Standing in front of the gate, the difference is easy to see once you know to look for it, and it reflects the shape of the plot rather than any design intention.

Neither arm occupies its original ground. In 1973 the prefectural road along the shore was widened, and the wall was taken back to a new line together with the gate. Relocation is common among registered properties and is not treated as disqualifying, though it does mean the relationship between the wall and the road today is a product of the 1970s rather than the 1860s.

One consequence is worth noticing on site. Because gate and wall were moved as a set, their alignment and their shared roofline survived the operation intact, and the frontage still works as a single composition. Walls of this kind were routinely demolished during road-widening schemes across Japan in the same decades. This one was carried back instead.

Where to Stand

Honkoji Hei faces the public road, so it can be looked at and photographed from the pavement at any hour of any day, free of charge and without arrangement. There is no need to enter the grounds to see it, and the best view of the composition is from across Prefectural Route 45, where the gate and both arms of the wall fit into one frame. The temple is an active parish church of Jodo Shinshu rather than a visitor site, and the main hall inside is not open on a set schedule.

The surroundings explain the place. Sawane developed as the port serving the Tsurushi silver mine, opened in 1542 in the hills immediately behind, and inscribed in July 2024 as part of the Sado Island Gold Mines on the UNESCO World Heritage List. From Ryotsu Port the drive is around forty minutes; the Honsen bus between Ryotsu and Aikawa passes the wall itself, and Sawane Gakko-mae is the nearest stop.