Jodoji Temple (Oita)

About Jodoji Temple in Oita

Jodoji Temple (浄土寺, Jōdo-ji) is a Jodo-sect Buddhist temple in Oji Nishimachi, Oita City, said to have been founded in 1501, and seven of its structures, headed by the Main Hall rebuilt in 1849, became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 October 2008.

Its full title is Kenbutsuzan Saigon-in Jodoji, and it belongs to the Chinzei branch of the Jodo (Pure Land) school, which teaches salvation through calling on the name of Amida Buddha. According to the temple's own history, the founding patron was Otomo Chikaharu, lord of Bungo province and great-grandfather of the better-known Otomo Sorin, while the founding priest was Man'yo Kakuryo, a monk who had travelled down from Omi province to preach. The grounds sit in an ordinary residential stretch of western Oita, about ten minutes by car from JR Oita Station.

The seven registered structures are the Main Hall, the Priests' Quarters, the Entrance and Corridor that links them, the Daibenzaiten Stone Shrine, the Ippakuko Mausoleum, the Front Gate and the North Gate. Together they span roughly 170 years, from the late Edo period to 1925.

What draws most visitors is a single grave. Matsudaira Tadanao, a grandson of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, spent the last decades of his life in exile here, and the small mausoleum holding his memorial stone is one of the seven registered buildings.

Fires and Rebuilding

Jodoji has burned down twice. The temple history records a first loss in 1573, during the wars of the late sixteenth century, followed by a rebuilding whose date is not known. The second came in 1773, when a fire in the neighbourhood spread to the grounds and destroyed everything.

Recovery took more than seventy years. The present Main Hall was completed in 1849, and the temple still describes it with pride as a great hall "twelve ken on each side." The Priests' Quarters, dated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to the late Edo period, is the oldest building on site.

A five-year restoration began in 2008, the same year as the registration. The temple says ground subsidence had damaged the Main Hall and the Priests' Quarters, and that the work kept as much original timber as possible while adding modern seismic reinforcement.

Matsudaira Tadanao, the Exiled Lord

Tadanao was the eldest son of Yuki Hideyasu, Ieyasu's second son, and ruled the wealthy domain of Kitanosho in Echizen (present-day Fukui). He fought with distinction at the Summer Siege of Osaka, yet his relations with the shogunate soured, and in 1623 he was banished to the Funai domain in Bungo. In exile he took the name Ippaku.

The temple's account holds that grief over the death of his consort, Oran, brought him into friendship with Shin'yo, the tenth head priest, and that he turned to the nembutsu faith for the rest of his life. He later moved his residence to Tsumori, now part of Oita's Takio district, and died in 1650 at the age of 56. The eleventh head priest, Tan'yo Ryotaku, conducted his funeral, and he was buried at Jodoji.

The temple says it was allowed to use the Tokugawa hollyhock crest in recognition of its role in Tadanao's later life. That crest is still carved on the doors of the Ippakuko Mausoleum.

How the Grounds Are Laid Out

The plan of Jodoji is built around three connected buildings that all face east. Using the Agency for Cultural Affairs descriptions, the seven registered structures fall into place as follows.

Three east-facing buildings

The Main Hall stands slightly south of the centre of the grounds, its front turned to the east. The Priests' Quarters stands to its north, also facing east, and a north-south corridor joins the two, with a small entrance porch under a hip-and-gable roof projecting from its east side. The Agency singles out this aligned frontage as the heart of the temple's dignified appearance.

In front of the Main Hall

The Front Gate, a Shikyakumon or four-legged gate, stands directly before the Main Hall and serves as the temple's public face. The Ippakuko Mausoleum lies to the east of the hall, in plain sight once you step into the forecourt.

On the northern edge

The North Gate opens onto the street along the northern boundary. It is also a four-legged gate, though its roof and bracketing differ from those of the Front Gate.

In the garden behind the Priests' Quarters

The Daibenzaiten Stone Shrine stands in the garden northwest of the Priests' Quarters, away from the main line between gate and hall.

An octagonal three-storey pagoda beside the Main Hall serves as a columbarium for parishioners. It is a modern structure and is not among the registered properties.

Layers of Date

Arranged by the dates in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, the seven structures line up like this:

• Priests' Quarters: late Edo period, altered at the very end of the Edo period
• Ippakuko Mausoleum: late Edo period, moved in 1925 and again in 1974
• Entrance and Corridor: final decades of the Edo period
• Main Hall: 1849, renovated in 1980
• Front Gate: late Meiji period, altered in 1951 and moved in 1974
• Daibenzaiten Stone Shrine: 1911, moved in 1974
• North Gate: 1925, moved in 1974

The core of hall, corridor and quarters belongs to the long recovery after the 1773 fire, and the gates and the stone shrine were added between the Meiji and Taisho eras.

The relocations stand out. In 1974 four structures, the mausoleum, both gates and the stone shrine, were moved in the same year, which suggests a wholesale rearrangement of the grounds. No published source explains why. In 1925, too, the North Gate went up and the mausoleum was moved.

The Registration

All seven structures were registered on 23 October 2008 in the 61st round of registrations, with official notice published on 10 November 2008. Their registration numbers run consecutively from 44-0149 to 44-0155. The Priests' Quarters and the Entrance and Corridor were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country; the other five were registered as models of design.

• Main Hall (44-0149): timber, single storey, tiled roof, building area 454 square metres
• Priests' Quarters (44-0150): timber, 2 storeys, tiled roof, building area 164 square metres
• Entrance and Corridor (44-0151): timber, single storey, tiled roof, building area 51 square metres
• Daibenzaiten Stone Shrine (44-0152): stone, area 2.3 square metres
• Ippakuko Mausoleum (44-0153): timber, single storey, tiled roof, building area 7.3 square metres
• Front Gate (44-0154): timber, tiled roof, opening 3.3 metres wide, with flanking walls
• North Gate (44-0155): timber, tiled roof, opening 2.7 metres wide, with flanking walls

The range of scale is striking, from a 454-square-metre hall to a 2.3-square-metre shrine carved from four blocks of stone. They were registered together because each is part of one temple landscape.

Visiting and Getting There

Jodoji is a working parish temple that holds funerals and memorial services, not a sightseeing temple with a ticket window. The Oita city tourism site lists no opening hours and no closing days, and as of October 2026 no official admission fee or visiting hours had been published. Walk the grounds quietly and give way to any service in progress.

If you hope to see inside the halls or to photograph interiors, contact the temple office in advance (097-532-3534). Photographs of each structure are also available in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.

The nearest station is Nishi-Oita on the JR Nippo Line, about a 10-minute walk away. By bus, board at stop 7 outside the Funai Central (north) exit of JR Oita Station, on a service bound for Yusuhara, Sky Town or Tsukuebaru, and get off at Higashi-Ikiishi, about 3 minutes on foot from the temple. By car it is roughly 10 minutes from Oita Station. The city gives the parking capacity as about 80 cars; the tourism site says 87.

Two addresses circulate. The Agency and the city's heritage pages use the land-register lot number, 93-1 Oji Nishimachi, while the temple and the tourism site use the street address, 8-35 Oji Nishimachi. Both point to the same grounds.

A Note on Names

Jodoji simply means "Pure Land Temple," and many temples across Japan share the name, including well-known ones in Onomichi, Hiroshima, and in Ono, Hyogo. This site adds "Oita" to tell this one apart. In the national database each structure is listed under the temple name followed by the building name, as in Jodoji Honden for the Main Hall.

Readings vary slightly between sources. The Agency reads the stone shrine as Daibenzaiten Sekigu, while the city reads it as Daibenzaiten Ishigu. The mausoleum is Ippakuko-byo, after Ippaku, the name Tadanao used in exile, with ko as an honorific.