Kasuga Shrine Komoriya

What the Kasuga Shrine Komoriya Is

Kasuga Shrine Komoriya (春日神社籠り屋, Kasuga Jinja Komoriya) is a retreat hall built in 1927 in the grounds of Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine in Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 28, 2011. A komoriya is a building where people stay at a shrine overnight to pray or to prepare for a festival, and this one sits at the end of the covered bridge that runs from the kagura hall.

It is a single-storey timber building 5.9 metres by 3.9 metres, with a footprint of 23 square metres, a gabled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri) laid with pantiles (Sangawara-buki) and a small tiled canopy over its west front. Inside, the north half is a concrete-floored work area (Doma) and the south half a raised room of eight tatami mats.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists three uses for the Kasuga Shrine Komoriya. Besides its original role as a vigil hall, it serves as the dressing room for the kagura stage and as the meeting hall for local residents. Worship, performance and village business have all shared this one small building.

The plan follows those uses. Half the floor is an earthen-style area you can enter in shoes; the other half is a matted room where people sit. Work space and sitting room fit under one roof.

It is one of the youngest of the 13 registered structures: an early Showa addition to a kagura stage built in 1835. Joined to that older stage, it shows how the precinct grew by adding buildings that work together.

What to Look For

Look first at how it connects to the kagura hall. The bridge that angles off the north side of the stage runs straight to the Kasuga Shrine Komoriya, so stage and dressing room are linked by a covered walkway you can trace on foot.

On the west front, a short tiled canopy shelters the entrance. The concrete floor was a modern material for an outbuilding at a village shrine at the time, a small sign of its date inside an otherwise traditional timber frame and pantiled roof.

Visiting the Komoriya

The Kasuga Shrine Komoriya is still used as a meeting hall and is not open inside. You can see the exterior from the north side of the kagura hall. If a gathering is under way, keep a respectful distance. Directions and general visiting information are on the Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine page.