Ono Shrine Former Worship Hall and Offering Hall (Shrine Office)

The Hall That Was Replaced and Kept

The former worship hall and offering hall of Ono Shrine (男神社旧拝殿及び幣殿（社務所）, Ono-jinja Kyū-haiden oyobi Heiden, at a shrine also known as Otakebi no Miya) stands in Onosato, Sennan City, Osaka Prefecture, was built in 1882, and was added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 October 2017. It now serves as the shrine office.

Most shrine buildings that lose their function lose everything else soon after. This one did not. Raised in the fifteenth year of Meiji as the shrine's worship hall, repaired in 1903, it was pushed aside around 1940 when the congregation commissioned a larger hall from the Osaka architect Ikedaya Hisakichi. Rather than pulling it down, they took it apart, moved it, and put it back together off to the side of the forecourt, where it has handled the shrine's paperwork ever since.

The building is small: 39 square metres, single storey, timber, roofed now in copper sheet. Five bays along the front, two deep, under a kirizuma gable roof, the simple two-slope form with the ridge running the length of the building.

Its original type was the warihaiden, a worship hall divided by an open passage running through the middle at ground level. Visitors walked in through one side and out the other, passing beneath the roof on their way to the sanctuary rather than stopping in front of it. The form is a Kinki region speciality and turns up across Osaka, Nara and Wakayama. Conversion to an office closed the passage off, but the five-bay rhythm of the facade still records where it ran.

An Entrance Worth More Than the Building

Look at the front and one thing is obvious: the porch got the budget.

A chidori-hafu, a triangular dormer gable, sits on the roof slope above the centre of the facade. Below it a kara-hafu entrance projects forward. The kara-hafu is the undulating gable of Japanese architecture, its bargeboard rising in a shallow S-curve at each side and cresting in the middle, a profile developed in the medieval period and reserved thereafter for entrances that mattered.

Under that porch the carpentry gets specific. The eaves purlin is carried by hiramitsudo, a bracket set of three blocks arranged in a line on the beam, and by sanehijiki, a bracket arm bearing directly on the purlin, set on top of taiheizuka struts. Taiheizuka means fat-bottle strut, and the shape is exactly that: a short post swelling at the base like a flask. Stacking a sanehijiki on top of one is a fussy, expensive way to hold up a roof edge, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs points to precisely this cluster of details as an elaborate design reflecting the carpentry traditions of this part of Izumi province.

That is the argument for the listing. The criterion applied was that the building serves as a model of design, and its register number is 27-711. Two other structures at Ono Shrine were registered on the same day: the current worship and offering halls, and the openwork fence around the sanctuary.

Note the date pairing. This former hall went up in 1882, and the openwork fence dates from about the same moment. They were built as a set, in a single campaign of works, and they still belong together even though one of them has since moved.

Where Visitors Actually Go

Of the three registered buildings at Ono Shrine, this is the one you approach most closely, because this is where the shrine staff are. Amulets and goshuin, the calligraphic seals collected by shrine visitors, are issued here. The office keeps roughly 9am to 5pm hours; the shrine's telephone number is 072-483-2266. The interior is not open for viewing, but standing at the counter puts you directly under that kara-hafu porch, close enough to see the bracket blocks.

The shrine is said to offer an amulet of its own made with seeds from the mukuroji, the soapberry tree on the grounds, reported to be the largest of its kind in Osaka Prefecture. The characters used to write mukuroji can be read as child free of affliction, which is the usual explanation given for the custom. Availability changes, so ask at the counter.

The grounds themselves are open at all times and free. Parking holds about twenty cars, and the last stretch of road is narrow. From Tarui Station on the Nankai Main Line the walk is around twenty-six minutes; the Sennan community bus southern loop stops at Onosato-naka. The wooded approach runs a considerable distance from the first torii, and the whole shrine grove is on the Osaka Midori no Hyakusen list of a hundred notable green spaces in the prefecture.

For the building at its busiest, come on 15 January for the Okudashiki, the gruel divination in which the year's harvest is read from bamboo tubes, or during the Tōka Ebisu observance in early January. Late May brings the firefly festival, when the approach goes dark and the himebotaru come out. A seal design that changes month to month is reported to be available, which gives collectors a reason to return.