Kumata Shrine Main Hall (Third Hall)

The Third Hall of Kumata Jinja

Behind the worship area at Kumata Jinja, in the Hirano district of southeastern Osaka, three small wooden shrine buildings stand in a row. The one on the right is the Third Hall, raised in 1513 and counted today among the oldest surviving wooden structures in the city. It is a compact building, a single bay wide, roofed in cypress bark and built in the Kasuga style, with the forward sweep and upturned ridge that mark the form. The deity enshrined here is Izanagi-no-Mikoto, worshipped at this site as Kumano Shōjō Gongen.

How the hall came to stand here

Kumata Jinja traces its founding to the year 862, when Sakanoue no Masamichi, a descendant of the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, is said to have enshrined the deity of the Gion cult on land he held at Kumata. That line belongs to the First Hall.

The Third Hall has a separate origin. According to the shrine's own Edo-period history, in 1190 a mountain ascetic arrived carrying an image of Kumano Shōjō Gongen, said to have been carved by the legendary practitioner En no Gyōja, and the deity was installed beside the one already worshipped here.

The present building dates from 1513, the year recorded on its ridge tablets, or munafuda. Two of these tablets survive and are protected together with the hall. During the Siege of Osaka in the early seventeenth century much of the shrine was wrecked, but the main halls escaped fire. Repairs led by the local magistrate were carried out between 1618 and 1625.

Why it is designated

The Third Hall was designated an Important Cultural Property on 18 February 1949. Its neighbour, the Second Hall, was raised in the same year and holds the same rank; the First Hall, brought from Kasuga Taisha in Nara in 1711, was added to the designation later. What gives the 1513 pair its standing is age and documentation together. The dated ridge tablets pin the buildings to a known year, and both are reckoned among the oldest wooden buildings still standing in Osaka.

Looking at the building

Seen up close, the Third Hall rewards a slow look. It is built in ikkensha kasuga-zukuri, the single-bay Kasuga form: a near-square plan, a gabled roof that runs forward into a canopy projecting over the entrance steps, and the curved ridge ornaments associated with the style.

The Second Hall beside it went up the same year in a different idiom. That one is a three-bay nagare-zukuri, with the long forward-flowing roof that gives the style its name. Set side by side, the two halls let a visitor compare two of the standard shrine forms of medieval Japan, built by the same hands in the same season.

The halls sit behind an inner fence and are seen from the front of the worship area rather than entered. Early morning, before the day's visitors arrive, is the easiest time to trace the lines of the roofs.

Around the shrine

Kumata Jinja keeps a building found nowhere else in Japan: a renga-sho, a hall for composing linked verse, rebuilt in 1708 and protected as an Osaka City cultural property. Linked-verse gatherings are still held there every month, and the shrine even runs sessions online.

Beyond Hirano the shrine is best known for its summer festival, held from 11 to 14 July, when nine danjiri floats are pulled through the old town. The procession into the shrine on the 13th, with the floats arriving one after another over some four and a half hours, draws crowds said to top 300,000. The oldest of the surviving floats was built in 1845.

Getting there is simple. The shrine is about a six-minute walk southeast of Hirano Station on the JR Yamatoji Line. The grounds are open and free to enter; the main halls are not open inside, but their roofs and front elevations are clearly visible from the worship area.