Kasuga Shrine Main Hall

A Zelkova Sanctuary at the Centre of Mikasayama

Kasuga Shrine Main Hall (春日神社本殿, Kasuga-jinja Honden, also written Kasuga Jinja Honden) is the principal sanctuary of Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine in the Kusachi district of Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, dated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to the closing decades of the Edo period (1830 to 1868), and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 October 2011.

It sits at the middle of the precinct, facing south, on a stone-faced platform. The footprint is small, about 17 square metres, single storey, roofed in copper plate. Architecturally it is a sangensha, a sanctuary three bays wide, under a kirizuma-zukuri gable roof, with a one-bay canopy over the front steps. The combination is worth pausing over. Most Japanese shrine sanctuaries of this scale use nagare-zukuri, in which the front roof slope sweeps forward in a long curve. Here the gable is kept short and square, and the building rises tall instead of spreading wide.

A railed veranda with an assembled balustrade wraps the four sides. Across the front hang hajitomi, half-shutters hinged at the top, while the first bay of each flank carries a panelled san-karado door. Look up into the gable and the structure declares itself: two stacked kōryō beams, curved like a shallow rainbow, with a bulbous daiheizuka strut between them, and bracket sets that step out twice from the wall plane before carrying a small ceiling and curved shirin panels.

The whole is zelkova, worked and left bare. Only the cut ends of the members are picked out in white.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration is not the same thing as designation. Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties, created in 1996, is a lighter instrument aimed at buildings roughly fifty years old or more that contribute to the historic character of the country. Owners keep a free hand over ordinary use and repair, and in exchange the state records the building and offers technical help. The Main Hall was registered under the first criterion, contribution to the historic landscape.

It was not registered alone. Thirteen structures at this shrine went onto the register on the same day, numbered 44-0183 through 44-0195, the Main Hall taking the first number in the run. The survey behind that decision was carried out in October 2010 by the architectural history laboratory of Kumamoto University's graduate school, under Professor Itō Ryūichi, and submitted to the Agency for Cultural Affairs in January 2011.

What the survey emphasised was arrangement rather than any single building. Worship hall, offering hall and sanctuary are set on one axis, with stone steps and a gate on the west, an arrangement that echoes Usa Jingū, the great shrine a short distance north that shaped religious building across this corner of Kyushu. Flanking the Main Hall stand two auxiliary shrines, Yasaka to the east and Itsukushima to the west, a three-hall grouping that parallels the east and west treasure halls at Yusuhara Hachimangū near Oita City. Northern Oita has many shrines of this type. Few retain the full set, gates, bell tower, kagura stage and all, in repaired condition.

The date deserves a caveat. The shrine's own chronicle, Mikasayama Kasuga Jinja-shi of 2003, records a rebuilding in Bunka 7 (1810), but the Kumamoto survey found no firm documentary support for it and placed the building on stylistic grounds in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry gives the broader bracket of 1830 to 1868. The three accounts are compatible in substance and differ in precision.

What to Look For

Approach from the front and the carving on the canopy asks to be looked at closely. The kibana, the projecting nose of the horizontal tie beam, is cut as a lion on the front face and as an elephant on the two sides. Neither creature was native to the carver's world. Both had arrived in the Japanese architectural vocabulary through Buddhist temple building centuries earlier, and by the nineteenth century a village shrine carpenter could deploy them without comment.

Inside, four tatami mats are laid at the front and the rear is given over to the god-shelf. Two central pillars stand slightly behind the line of the side columns, framing a raised central bay with doors. That raised centre is a later alteration; originally the three compartments were level.

There is also a ceiling above the ceiling. The present interior has a coved plaster surface put in during the major repairs of 2000 to 2002, and the older kagami-tenjō, a flat mirror ceiling, survives intact in the cavity above it. Nothing of this is visible to a visitor, and knowing it is there changes how the building reads.

One more thing to hold in mind while standing in front of it. Four deities live in this single hall: Takemikazuchi, Futsunushi, Amenokoyane and Hime-Ōkami, the four of Kasuga. Until the sixteenth century they occupied four separate halls. When Ōtomo Sōrin, the Christian daimyo of Bungo, stripped the shrines of his domain in the 1550s and after, the four halls burned along with almost everything else here. Parishioners rebuilt a single sanctuary in 1577 and put the four gods together in it. The three-bay plan is the shape that decision left behind.

The precinct is open at any hour and there is no admission charge. The interior of the Main Hall is not open to the public; it is seen from the worship hall in front, across the offering hall, and the flanking auxiliary shrines can be examined at close range from the veranda level. Photography of the exterior is not restricted, though it is worth asking at the shrine office before photographing during a rite. The shrine can be reached in about fifteen minutes by car from JR Usa Station on the Nippō Main Line, roughly seven kilometres away, or in about ten minutes from the Shōwa no Machi district of central Bungotakada. Enquiries go to the shrine office on 0978-24-2529.