Kasuga Shrine Worship Hall

A Hall Nine Bays Wide, Open on Three Sides

Kasuga Shrine Worship Hall (春日神社拝殿, Kasuga-jinja Haiden) is the worship hall of Mikasayama Kasuga Shrine in the Kusachi district of Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, built in 1921 during the Taishō era, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 October 2011.

The building runs east to west, with its long side facing the visitor who comes up the main approach. Nine bays by four, roughly 103 square metres, single storey under a hipped-and-gabled irimoya roof of heavy hongawara tiles. At the centre of the front a one-bay canopy projects, itself given a small irimoya roof rather than the simpler gable that a building of this rank might have settled for.

Square pillars stand on a plinth of cut stone and are tied together by penetrating nuki beams. Inside there are no partitions: one room, boarded floor, coffered ceiling overhead. The two flanks are earthen wall. Everything else is opening.

That last point is the character of the building. Stand inside on a clear afternoon and the hall reads less as a room than as a covered stretch of the precinct, air moving through it, the offering hall and sanctuary framed straight ahead.

An Arrangement Borrowed from Usa

Wide, laterally extended worship halls of this kind cluster in northern Oita, especially around Usa and across the Kunisaki Peninsula, where they are sometimes described as kairō, corridor halls. The reason lies a few kilometres north. Usa Jingū, head shrine of the roughly forty thousand Hachiman shrines in Japan, set the pattern that carpenters in this district worked from for centuries.

The Kumamoto University survey of October 2010, led by Professor Itō Ryūichi of the graduate school's architectural history laboratory, made that inheritance the core of its case for registration. Worship hall, offering hall and sanctuary here are placed on a single straight axis, with stone steps and a gate opening to the west, which is how Usa Jingū is organised. Two auxiliary shrines flank the sanctuary, echoing the east and west treasure halls at Yusuhara Hachimangū. The survey's conclusion was that the value lay in the completeness of the set rather than in any one structure, and thirteen items were registered together on 28 October 2011, this hall taking number 44-0187.

The Worship Hall is the youngest of the three central buildings and the largest by a wide margin. The sanctuary behind it dates to the late Edo period and covers 17 square metres; the offering hall between them was put up in 1905 and covers 12; this hall, from 1921, covers 103. The sequence is legible as a fact about the community as much as about architecture. Rebuilding worked outward from the god's dwelling toward the space where people gather, and the space where people gather kept growing.

The Hall in Use

This is not a building kept for inspection. Look up at the wall of the hall and you may find a large target hung upside down with the character for oni, demon, brushed on it. That is the mato-i rite: the head priest and the parish representatives each loose three arrows at it, and the pierced target stays up in the worship hall afterwards as a mark of the year's protection.

The kagura stage stands to the southeast, connected by an angled bridge-way, and Shōnai kagura is performed at the spring festival, which also carries a rite for children entering school. That rite has a local history behind it. Two private academies operated in Kusachi from the end of the Edo period into the middle of Meiji, and between them they sent out some three thousand students; the shrine was where those students were commended. The custom lapsed after the war and has since been revived, with teachers bringing pupils to the precinct.

The autumn festival is the year's largest, spread over three weekends in October: the rope-lowering rite on the third Sunday, the portable shrine's descent on the fourth Saturday, its return on the fourth Sunday. Children's sumo returned to the programme in 2006 after a ten-year gap.

The tiles overhead have a history of their own. During the major repairs of 2000 to 2002, undertaken by the parish, this hall and three others were re-roofed in hongawara of an older type, round and flat tiles laid in alternation rather than the interlocking pantiles that had become standard.

Visiting is straightforward. The precinct is open at all hours with no admission charge, and because the hall is open on three sides its interior, floor, ceiling and framing can be taken in from the front steps without entering. Photography of the building is unrestricted; during rites it is courteous to ask at the shrine office first. JR Usa Station on the Nippō Main Line lies about seven kilometres away, fifteen minutes by car, and the Shōwa no Machi district of central Bungotakada about ten minutes. The shrine office can be reached on 0978-24-2529.