Ono Shrine Openwork Fence

A Fence Listed for the Landscape It Makes

The openwork fence of Ono Shrine (男神社透塀, Ono-jinja Sukibei, at a shrine also known as Otakebi no Miya) stands in Onosato, Sennan City, Osaka Prefecture, dates from around 1882, and was added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 October 2017.

Three structures at this shrine were registered on that day, and this one was listed under a different criterion from the other two. The worship hall and the former worship hall qualified as models of design. The fence qualified as a contributor to the historic landscape of the country. It is also classified not as a building but as a work of construction, the category the Agency for Cultural Affairs uses for walls, gates, bridges and the like. The distinction is worth holding onto, because it explains what this object is being asked to do.

A sukibei is a fence you are meant to see through. The lower part is solid, the upper part is open, and the whole thing divides sacred ground without sealing it. At Ono Shrine it separates the honden, the sanctuary where the deities are enshrined, from the worship hall in front of it. Total length is about 18 metres. From a point near the centre it runs three bays to the east and turns a corner to continue seven and a half bays west, so the plan is an L rather than a straight line.

The roof is kirizuma, a simple two-slope gable, tiled in hongawarabuki: broad flat pan tiles laid in courses with semi-cylindrical cover tiles capping every joint. The Agency's structural field records the roofing simply as tiled, while its descriptive text specifies the hongawara method.

The Grammar of a Screen

Read the fence from the ground up and it resolves into four horizontal bands.

At the base, between the posts, run hameita, solid plank panels that give the fence its weight and keep the lower half opaque. Above them a koshi-nageshi, a horizontal tie rail, crosses the posts at hip height. Higher up a second rail, the uchinori-nageshi, runs at the level of a door head. Between those two rails is the open zone: renji-mado, windows filled with closely spaced vertical bars, repeated bay after bay along the whole run.

That band of vertical bars is the point of the entire structure. Stand at the worship hall and look through it. Behind the lattice sits the honden, a five-bay nagare-zukuri sanctuary from the middle of the seventeenth century, designated a cultural property by Osaka Prefecture in 2016 together with the neighbouring Wakamiya Shrine sanctuary. Red lacquer shows through the gaps. Above the columns, bracket complexes carry carvings of lions, elephants, birds and flowers, and traces of late Edo period polychromy survive on them. The fence releases the sanctuary in fragments, a bay at a time, and never all at once.

The eaves are hitonoki sodaruki, a single tier of rafters set at wide intervals rather than the dense parallel ranks used on higher-status buildings. Restraint again, and appropriate to a fence.

The one flourish sits at the gable apex. There hangs an umebachi gegyo, a pendant board shaped like the plum-blossom crest, five rounded lobes arranged around a centre. Gegyo means hanging fish; the boards began as water charms placed at the point where a roof is most vulnerable to fire, and the fish reference survives in the name long after the shape stopped resembling one. Careful joinery of this order on a boundary fence is unusual, and the registration cites the quality of the work along with the role the fence plays in composing the precinct.

Its register number is 27-712. The Agency dates it to around 1882 with repairs in the early Shōwa period, which places its construction alongside the former worship hall of the same year. The two were made together, in one campaign, by the same generation of carpenters.

Seeing It Without Trying to Get Past It

The grounds of Ono Shrine are open at any hour and free. The fence stands in the open air and is visible from the forecourt without asking anyone, unlike the interiors of the shrine buildings, which are closed. Sennan City asks visitors not to enter the worship hall or the sanctuary without permission, so the fence marks the practical limit of a normal visit as well as the ritual one.

Photography works best in the morning, when light angles into the lattice from the east rather than flattening it. Come close and look along the run instead of straight at it; the bars line up and then open as you move, which is the effect the carpenters were working with.

Getting there: the shrine sits at 3-chome Onosato, roughly twenty-six minutes on foot from Tarui Station on the Nankai Main Line, or a short walk from the Onosato-naka stop on the Sennan community bus southern loop. Parking holds about twenty cars and the final approach road is narrow. The shrine office keeps roughly 9am to 5pm hours.

The setting is half the listing. Ono Shrine appears in the tenth-century Engishiki register, moved to this site in 859 according to shrine tradition, and its grove is on the Osaka Midori no Hyakusen list of a hundred notable green spaces in the prefecture. The grounds hold a camphor with two trunks from one root, called the Meoto-kusu, and a soapberry said to be the largest in Osaka Prefecture. In late May the shrine holds a firefly festival, and himebotaru move along the darkened approach after kagura dance and gagaku are performed at the worship hall. On 15 January comes the Okudashiki, in which rice gruel boiled in labelled bamboo tubes is read for the coming harvest. Any of those days will put the fence in front of you with the precinct doing what it was built to do.