Isurugi Shrine Main Hall

What the Isurugi Shrine Main Hall in Niigata City is

The Isurugi Shrine Main Hall (石動神社本殿, Isurugi Jinja Honden) is a gabled main hall built in 1796 in Hakushincho, Kita Ward, Niigata City, relocated in 2004, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 8, 2008.

It is the main hall of Isurugi Shrine (Niigata City), the shrine on the hill of Kuzutsuka, and it is joined to the worship hall in front by an offering hall (heiden). Nagaoka City has an Isurugi Shrine Main Hall too, but that is a separate building of 1934.

The building stands on raised ground at the center of the precinct. Its roof is a simple gable, Kirizuma-zukuri, covered in interlocking pantiles. It is two bays wide and one bay deep, with a footprint of 6.4 square meters. Niigata City's list of registered properties gives 1796 in its notes, and that makes it the oldest of the shrine's three registered buildings.

Why the Isurugi Shrine Main Hall was registered

The Isurugi Shrine Main Hall was registered in the 60th round as number 15-0296, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, on the same day as the worship hall and the Furumine Shrine Main Hall.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that its ornament reflects its period well, pointing to the egata and the Kaerumata. Egata are the scroll and leaf patterns cut into beams and beam ends, and the way their lines are drawn changed from one era to the next. In other words, the decoration itself backs up the late 18th-century date.

The frame is solid and conventional. The posts are tied by a waist-height Nageshi, a head tie beam (kashiranuki) and a capping plate (daiwa), and carry the eave purlins and a rainbow beam. On the beam stands a Kentozuka post, and a bracket block with an arm (daito hijiki) and carved beam ends passes the load up to the ridge beam. The sides and back are closed with horizontal boarding, and there is no veranda around the building.

What to look for at the Isurugi Shrine Main Hall

The gable end is the place to look. There the whole chain is on show: the rainbow beam, the short post rising from it, the bracket block and arm, and finally the ridge beam. Trace it with your eyes from bottom to top.

Then study the surface of the beam and the kaerumata. The egata the Agency singles out are shallow carved lines on the beam. Compare them with the carving on the worship hall's porch, a few decades younger, and see whether you can read the difference in date.

The plain sides, with no veranda, also say something about the building. The worship hall has a railed veranda on three sides and faces outward to worshippers; the main hall is closed in with boards, purely a dwelling for the kami.

Visiting the Isurugi Shrine Main Hall

The Isurugi Shrine Main Hall stands behind the worship and offering halls, on the raised center of the grounds. From the front of the approach it tends to be hidden by the worship hall, so walk around the side of the precinct to see its boarded walls and the brackets of the gable. No opening of the interior or special viewing is announced.

We found no published photography policy. Photograph the exterior only, without getting in the way of worship or festivals. Directions and the festival calendar are on the Isurugi Shrine (Niigata City) page.