Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine

Eleven structures for one rite

The Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine is a walled compound of eleven structures at Shizutani in Bizen City, Okayama Prefecture, completed in 1684 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 4 July 1938. It occupies the highest ground in the school precinct and was built to honour Confucius, whose teaching the school existed to transmit.

Shizutani School had been running since 1670 as a school for commoners, with a modest hall of worship put up early on. What survives today replaced it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs register dates the group to Jokyo 1, or 1684, when the new Taiseiden was finished, and in 1686 the school performed sekisai, the offering rite for Confucius, for the first time. That rite is still held.

The eleven listed structures are the Taiseiden itself, the Chūtei, the east and west stairs, a small library, a kitchen, the plastered enclosing wall, the outer gate, the school gate known as Kakumeimon, the stone stairway, and the tethering post for sacrificial animals. They are protected as one designation, which is the right way to look at them: none of the eleven makes sense apart from the ceremony they were arranged to stage.

What the designation protects

The Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine was listed on 4 July 1938 under a single register number covering all eleven parts. Its owner is not recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database; the administering body is Okayama Prefecture.

The reason for treating the group as one thing is the plan. Buildings at Shizutani follow a Chinese arrangement, and here that arrangement is complete: an outer gate on the axis, an enclosing wall around all four sides, a hall raised on a masonry base, subsidiary structures for storage and preparation, and a stone post that once marked where an offering animal would be tied. Bizen City's account notes that the principal timbers of the shrine are camphor, chosen ahead of the woods used elsewhere in the school, and that the whole group stands on the highest terrace because Confucian propriety put the sage above everything else on the site.

The Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine is listed separately from the lecture hall below it and from the shrine to the school's founder immediately to the east, which sits one terrace lower as a deliberate act of deference. The ground beneath all of them is a Special Historic Site.

Details worth stopping for

Approach up the stone stairway. The register counts nineteen steps, and the climb is short enough that most visitors take it without noticing they have crossed from a school into a place of ritual. At the top, the school gate stands on the axis. Its roof is Kirizuma-zukuri with Hongawarabuki in Bizen ware, and the flanking wings carry Katōmado, the bell-shaped windows that give the gate its Chinese character. The alternative name Kakumeimon comes from the sound the doors are said to make when they swing, likened to a crane calling.

Inside the plastered enclosing wall, which runs 92.6 metres around all four sides, the Taiseiden is three bays square with an Irimoya-zukuri roof. Bizen City's description repays attention here. The base is dressed granite with a rounded moulding at its foot; the drip line under the eaves is paved with black Nachi pebbles set behind more dressed stone; every piece of exterior woodwork is lacquered, a measure against fire and driving rain; and the floor inside is laid with hexagonal Bizen ware tiles fitted flush to stiffen it.

The gilt bronze Confucius sits inside on a chair, about 90 centimetres tall, housed in a vermilion octagonal cabinet. It is not on general view. The doors open on a handful of days each year, including the reading ceremony on 4 January and sekisai on the fourth Saturday of October. Visitors on any other day see the hall and the cabinet, not the figure.

The smaller structures reward a slow circuit. The library and the kitchen are both Dozo-zukuri, thick-walled and plainly built, the library measuring 3.9 metres by 3.0 metres and the kitchen 3.8 metres by 3.1 metres. The Chūtei is listed in the register as a structure rather than an open yard, recorded with the same three-bay-square hipped-and-gabled form as the Taiseiden, and it stands between the outer gate and the main hall with the east and west stairs to either side. The tethering post is a plain stone column. Shizutani offers vegetables rather than animals at sekisai, so the post has been ceremonial from the beginning.

One date needs a note. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns 1684 to every part of the group, the school gate included, while the preservation society that manages the site gives 1686 for the gate. Both figures circulate on and off the grounds.

Two kaikinoki trees flank the stairway below the gate, grown from seed brought back from the grove at Confucius's grave in Qufu. They are not part of the designation, but in late autumn they set the colour against which most photographs of the Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine are taken.

Planning a visit

Timing matters more here than at most of the site, because the thing people most want to see is behind closed doors for all but a few days. If the Confucius figure is the point of the trip, aim for the fourth Saturday in October, when sekisai is performed, or 4 January. Otherwise the compound of the Former Shizutani School Confucian Shrine is open on ordinary terms.

Gates open at 9 a.m. and close at 5 p.m., every day except 29 to 31 December. Adults pay 400 yen, visitors aged 65 and over pay 200 yen, and elementary and junior high school pupils pay 100 yen. Parking costs nothing. Visitors walk up to the gate and view the halls from outside; the interiors are not entered on a general ticket. Photographs of the buildings are fine, though the museum elsewhere on the site restricts photography of its documents. Food and drink must stay in your bag inside the precinct, and pets cannot be brought in, with assistance animals handled case by case on enquiry.

From Okayama, the Sanyo Line reaches Yoshinaga Station in a little over half an hour; a city bus covers the last stretch in about ten minutes, and a taxi does it in eight. Coming from the coast, a taxi from Bizen-Katakami Station on the Ako Line takes about fifteen minutes, the same as the drive from the Bizen interchange on the Sanyo Expressway.

Thirty to forty minutes is enough for the compound at an unhurried pace, longer on a sekisai morning when the ceremony draws a crowd.