Kasuga Shrine West Gate

A Small Red Gate on the Western Approach

Kasuga Shrine West Gate (春日神社西門, Kasuga-jinja Nishimon) is a timber gate standing west of the worship hall at Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine in the Kusachi district of Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, built in the later Edo period between 1751 and 1830, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 October 2011.

It is modest by any measure: a single-bay, single-entrance gate with a frontage of 1.9 metres, tiled in heavy hongawara under a gable roof. The type is yakuimon. Two round main pillars carry the load, two chamfered square posts stand behind them as braces, and each pair is locked together by a head tie shaped like a shallow rainbow beam. Between main pillar and brace runs an obari, a stout horizontal beam, and on top of that sits a curved beam supporting the ridge. The rafters are single-tiered and widely spaced.

What a visitor notices first, though, is the colour. The timber is painted red, and the gate has long gone by a second name written 西紅門, the west crimson gate. Against the dark green of the shrine wood it reads from some distance.

Two Gates, Two Grades

The shrine has a second registered gate, and comparing them shows how carefully a village community could grade its own architecture.

The Main Gate stands in front of the worship hall on the southern axis. It is a shikyakumon, a four-legged gate, 3.4 metres wide with flanking walls, its main pillars round and tapered at the top, braces chamfered on all edges, brackets in three-block sets, a double-tiered rafter system and a coffered ceiling overhead. Shelved recesses in the front bays hold guardian figures. It was built in 1845.

The West Gate, some decades older, does none of this. Its brackets are absent, its rafters single and thinly spaced, its ceiling open. A yakuimon puts the ridge forward of the main pillars and leans on rear braces; the form is common at the side entrances of temples, residences and castles, precisely because it is quick to build and easy to pass through.

The point is that the difference is deliberate. The 2010 survey by Kumamoto University's architectural history laboratory, led by Professor Itō Ryūichi, identified the shrine's arrangement of hall, offering hall and sanctuary on one axis with stone steps and a gate to the west as an echo of Usa Jingū, the shrine that governed religious building across northern Oita. A western entrance was part of that inherited plan, and it was given a gate suited to its rank rather than a copy of the front one. In 1934 a stone myōjin torii, 3.1 metres wide and 3.9 metres tall, was raised at the head of the west approach, completing the route.

Thirteen Structures, One Landscape

The West Gate carries registration number 44-0192, the tenth in a run of thirteen registered here on a single day in 2011. The others are the sanctuary, the offering hall, the worship hall, the auxiliary shrines of Yasaka and Itsukushima, the main gate, the bell tower, the kagura stage, the vigil house, the entertainment stage at the resting-place a kilometre away, and two stone torii. Registration covered every timber building on the site apart from the portable shrine store and the resting-place hall, both of which had to be rebuilt during the 2000 to 2002 repairs because they had become unsafe.

Among that group the bell tower deserves a short detour. Built in 1830, a single-bay structure with a skirted base under a tiled hipped-and-gabled roof, it stands south of the worship hall facing the kagura stage across the approach. A bell tower inside a shrine precinct is a survival from the centuries when Buddhist and Shinto practice were interwoven, and on the Kunisaki Peninsula, where the Rokugō Manzan temple network shaped religious life for a thousand years, such survivals are the local grain rather than an oddity.

The shrine itself is said to have been founded in 809, when a white-haired old man riding a white deer appeared beneath a great oak on this hill. Almost everything standing was burned in the campaigns of Ōtomo Sōrin in the later sixteenth century, and the parish rebuilt from 1577 onward. The West Gate belongs to the long, patient stretch of that rebuilding.

Reaching it is easy. The precinct is open at all hours and free to enter, and the gate stands in the open where it can be walked through and examined from either side; there is nothing to book and no interior to view. The exterior may be photographed freely, though a word at the shrine office is appreciated during rites. JR Usa Station on the Nippō Main Line is about seven kilometres away, some fifteen minutes by car, and the Shōwa no Machi district of Bungotakada roughly ten minutes. Fuki-ji Ōdō, a National Treasure and one of the oldest wooden buildings in Kyushu, lies in the same city and pairs naturally with a visit here. Enquiries: 0978-24-2529.