Jissaiji Sanmon

The Gate at the Southeast Corner

Jissaiji Sanmon (実際寺山門, also written Jissai-ji Sanmon), the main gate of the Shingon Buddhist temple Jissaiji in the Nakashima district of Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, is a timber yakuimon gate that its ridge tablet shows was moved to this site in 1884, and it entered Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2019.

The gate stands at the southeast of the precinct and faces south. Its opening measures 2.6 metres, and short earthen sleeve walls run off it to left and right, tiled in hongawara like the gate itself. A yakuimon carries two main posts set toward the front and two lighter rear posts, with the ridge sitting off-centre above them. It is a form that reads as substantial without the four-post symmetry and elaborate ornament of a gate at a great monastery.

The dates line up once the sources are read together. The Agency's date field gives 1884, the seventeenth year of Meiji, while the descriptive note in the same record calls it a weighty gate reaching back into the late Edo period. Okayama Prefecture's recommendation resolves this: the ridge tablet records that the gate was moved here in 1884. So 1884 is the year of relocation, not construction, and the gate itself most likely dates from the late Edo period. Where it stood before is not stated in any published source.

Carpentry Worth Naming

The official description of this gate is unusually specific about joinery, and the terms repay a little unpacking.

The main posts are gohira, cut to a flattened rectangular section rather than a square one, which gives the gate a broad face when seen from the approach and a slimmer profile from the side. Across their heads runs the kabuki, the tie beam that gives this whole family of gates its structural logic. Above that the carpenter set a menbari and an obari, the lighter and heavier of a paired beam system, and carried the purlin and beam on demitsudo brackets, a three-block bracket set projecting forward from the post head.

At the gable ends sit a koryo, a beam given a gentle rainbow curve, and a kaerumata, the frog-leg strut whose splayed silhouette fills the triangle beneath the ridge. Below the ridge purlin the carpenter added kobana, small fist-shaped nose carvings at the beam ends. The eaves use hitonoki mabara-daruki, a single tier of rafters spaced widely apart rather than the dense parallel ranks of a high-status hall.

Taken together these choices describe a builder working carefully within limited means. The bracket sets and the carved noses are the vocabulary of formal temple architecture. The single sparse rafter tier and the modest 2.6-metre opening are the vocabulary of a village temple. Registration number 33-0334 was granted under the criterion that the structure contributes to the historic landscape of the country, which is exactly what a gate of this kind does.

Reading the Precinct From Its Threshold

Kurashiki City describes Jissaiji as a square temple ground built up on stone walls. The only way into that square is Jissaiji Sanmon, standing at the southeast corner and facing south. Approach from the south and the tiled ridge of the sleeve walls draws the eye toward the opening.

Stand in the gateway and the layout of the precinct falls into place. Right beside you on the east stands the two-storey barn. Further in on the left is the bell tower, and west of it the main hall faces east toward you. Jissaiji Sanmon does not screen the precinct from the street so much as frame it.

The sleeve walls deserve a moment. They are the tiled earthen walls attached to either side of the gate and are registered as part of Jissaiji Sanmon. The outer wall that wraps the east and north sides of the precinct is a separately registered structure that begins at the northeast corner of the barn, so do not confuse the two.

Jissaiji Sanmon faces the public approach, so it can be seen and photographed from outside at any hour. The gohira posts and the kabuki beam read best from the south, the rainbow beam and frog-leg strut from either side of the gate. Okayama Prefecture lists access to the Jissaiji buildings as exterior only. Before entering the precinct or taking photographs, a word with someone at the temple is the courteous course. Directions to the temple are on the Jissaiji Temple page.