Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall

Nine square meters, densely worked

Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall is a small shrine building of 1869 standing behind the Gooshoden complex at Saidaiji in Higashi-ku, Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, and it was added to the register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2017. It faces south from the top of a stone embankment, one bay square, under a pyramidal Hōgyō-zukuri roof of Hongawarabuki.

The building area is 9.2 square meters. That is roughly the floor of a small bedroom, and it makes Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall the smallest of the seven registered structures on this site by a wide margin. Everything about it is compressed except the amount of carving.

An okuden is an inner hall, the rearmost and most protected part of a shrine group. Here it holds the principal body of Gooshō Daigongen, the tutelary deity of the temple. That a Buddhist temple of the Shingon school maintains a deity hall of this kind reflects Shinbutsu-shūgō, the long practice of enshrining Shinto and Buddhist figures on one site, which survived the separation policies of the Meiji period at a number of Okayama temples.

Why so much detail on so little building

Registration in 2017 came under the criterion of serving as a model of design. The assessors' description is unusually pointed: a small shrine of one bay square, yet with a veranda carried around three sides, side screens at the flanks, and dense ornament concentrated on the entrance canopy and the Kumimono bracketing.

The eaves are double-tiered with closely spaced rafters, the futanoki shigedaruki arrangement, which at this scale means an unusual number of members per meter of eave. Standing close, the underside of the roof reads almost as texture rather than structure.

The temple adds a detail that explains part of the effect: the plan was originally laid out as a rectangle, and the design was changed partway through construction to the pyramidal form now standing. Buildings that change their minds mid-build often carry the evidence, and here the compact, slightly over-determined massing is where to look for it.

Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall also sits higher than everything around it. Placed on the stone embankment behind the main hall of the complex, it was at one time taken to be the main hall itself, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs records that misidentification in its notes. The elevation is not decorative. It puts the deity's body above the level of worshippers approaching from the south.

What to look for on site

Approach from the front of the Gooshoden and look past its roof rather than at it. The inner hall appears above and behind, and the height difference between the two is the first thing worth registering. The larger buildings in front date from 1880, eleven years after the inner hall, so the sequence of construction runs from back to front.

The side screens are a good place to slow down. These vertical boards close the ends of the veranda and are typically carved on shrine buildings of any ambition; on a hall this size they occupy a disproportionate share of the visible surface. Walk the three sides of the veranda line from the ground and the carving changes character at each corner.

The entrance canopy repays a close look at the bracket clusters and the members feeding into them. Compare them with the far heavier bracketing on the worship hall a few meters away and the difference in intent is clear: the larger building is built to impress a crowd, Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall to reward someone standing still.

The precinct around this corner also holds the twin camphor trees the temple calls the Wagō no Kusu and a stone Fudō figure that visitors douse with water. Neither is a registered building, but they set the atmosphere in which the inner hall is normally seen.

Visiting Saidaiji Gooshoden Inner Hall

The grounds of Saidaiji are open around the clock and the exterior of the building can be seen from the precinct without charge at any hour. Access is limited during the Saidaiji Eyō in February, when the area in front of the main hall is given over to the festival.

Paid interior admission at Saidaiji covers the main hall and the Gooshoden, at 500 yen for adults and 200 yen for children, received between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., with 100 yen off for groups of ten or more. Anyone hoping to see the inner hall at closer range should raise it at the temple office, since the temple publishes no separate opening arrangement for it. Advance booking also secures a guided explanation by a priest. The amulet counter operates from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Photographing the exterior is unrestricted in normal circumstances. No published rule covers interior photography, so follow the on-site notices.

Saidaiji Station on the JR Akō Line is about ten minutes away on foot. From the Okayama Tenmaya Bus Centre, buses reach Saidaiji Bus Centre in roughly 30 minutes, with a ten-minute walk after that. Parking is available inside the grounds.