Myojuji Temple Main Hall

A Meiji Main Hall Drawn by an Imperial Household Artist

Myojuji Hondo (妙壽寺本堂, also written Myōju-ji Hondō) is the main hall of a Jodo Shinshu temple in Kanaya-machi, Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, built around 1902 and added to Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2018.

The hall stands at the back of the precinct and faces east. Its frontage runs nine bays, its depth eight, and the building covers 764 square metres of ground. Both the width and the depth pass 20 metres, which in a town of low tiled roofs makes the ridge visible from several streets away. A three-bay kohai, the projecting porch that shelters the entrance steps, reaches out toward the courtyard, and a rear hall called a godo is attached behind the sanctuary.

Under the eaves, look for the support posts that carry the deep overhang. Each is topped with a bracket arm, and the outer face is worked up into a degumi bracket set, where small blocks and a shaped arm together take the weight of the round purlin above. It is fussier construction than a country parish usually pays for.

There is a reason for that. The drawings were made by Sasaki Iwajiro (1853–1936), a Kyoto architect who held the rank of Teishitsu Gigeiin, or Imperial Household Artist. Sasaki trained under the master carpenter Kigo Tosai, and when Higashi Honganji in Kyoto rebuilt its Amida Hall he was appointed Kigo's deputy, handling both design and site supervision through to completion. He also worked closely with Ito Chuta, one of the founding figures of modern Japanese architectural history, on surveys of old shrines and temples and on the working drawings for Heian Jingu.

Local records connect the two projects. Bungotakada City notes that the resemblance between this hall and the Amida Hall at Higashi Honganji is unusually close, which is a slightly surprising thing to find in a temple of the Honganji-ha branch rather than the Otani-ha to which Higashi Honganji belongs. The architect, not the sect, is what travelled south.

Why the Hall Was Registered

Japan protects historic buildings through two parallel systems, and the difference matters when reading about this hall. Designation (shitei) produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, and binds the owner to a permit system for almost any alteration. Registration (toroku), introduced in 1996 for the far larger body of buildings roughly fifty years old and upward, works by notification instead. Owners keep more freedom to repair and use the building, in exchange for telling the state before they change it. Myojuji Hondo belongs to the second category, entered in the eighty-ninth round of registrations under criterion two: a work that sets a standard for design.

The plan follows the Shin Buddhist template without deviation. Worshippers enter the gejin, the outer hall where the congregation sits. Behind it comes the yarai-no-ma, a transitional bay, and behind that the naijin, the inner sanctuary holding the image of Amida Buddha, flanked on either side by subsidiary chambers called yoma. Anyone who has sat in a Shin temple anywhere in Japan will recognise the sequence. What differs here is the quality of execution at each stage.

The coffered ceiling over the outer hall is set high, opening up the volume where the congregation gathers, and its grid is filled in a checkerboard pattern. Between the outer hall and the sanctuary run ranma transom panels carved and finished in gold leaf. Carving appears at many other points in the interior as well.

One further piece of evidence sets this building apart from most registered temple halls: the original drawings survive. Sasaki's plans and associated documents are still kept at Myojuji, and in 2022 the city designated them a municipal cultural property under the name Myojuji Hondo Sekkei Zumen oyobi Fuzoku Shiryo. For conservation reasons they are not put on public display. Their existence means the attribution to Sasaki rests on paper rather than on stylistic guesswork.

Visiting the Hall

Myojuji sits a few minutes east of Bungotakada Bus Terminal, at the edge of the district the city markets as Showa no Machi, a shopping street preserved in its 1950s and 1960s form. Most visitors come for the shopfronts and the retro museums. The temple roof is the large tiled mass rising behind them, and it takes about five minutes on foot to reach the gate.

The main hall was registered together with four other buildings in the same precinct, all entered on the same date in 2018. Walking the compound is the quickest way to understand how a provincial temple accumulated over three centuries. The kyozo, or sutra repository, stands immediately south of the hall and is thought to be the oldest structure on the site, built in the early eighteenth century; inside it holds an octagonal revolving bookcase called a rinzo, and traces of red ochre, white shell pigment and blue survive on its front pillars. The bell tower dates to 1761, its date recovered from ink writing found above the ceiling. Two gates, the chumon and the smaller sanmon, run out from the front of the hall toward the city road on the northeast.

Reaching Bungotakada takes some planning, since the town lost its railway in 1965. The nearest station is Usa on the JR Nippo Main Line, from which Daiko Hokubu buses bound for Bungotakada, Imi or Oita Airport run to the terminal in about ten minutes for 250 yen, at roughly one or two departures an hour between 7am and 5pm. Arriving by air, the Northliner limousine bus connects Oita Airport directly to the same terminal in about fifty minutes.

A practical note. Myojuji is a working parish temple with no admission desk and no published visiting hours. The precinct opens onto the street and the exterior can be seen freely, but entry to the interior and permission to photograph inside are at the temple's discretion, and contacting the temple office in advance is the reliable approach. Services and funerals take priority over sightseeing. The city's cultural properties office in the Matama branch building can also answer questions about the five registered structures.