Ono Shrine Worship Hall and Offering Hall

A Shrine Hall Built in 1941

The worship hall and offering hall of Ono Shrine (男神社拝殿及び幣殿, Ono-jinja Haiden oyobi Heiden, at a shrine written 男神社 and known locally as Otakebi no Miya, the shrine of the war cry) stand in Onosato, Sennan City, Osaka Prefecture, were completed in 1941, and were added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 October 2017.

Two rooms, one roofline. The haiden is the hall where visitors stop and pray: five bays wide, two bays deep, covered by an irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form that reads as a low pyramid with two triangular gable ends pushed out at either side. Behind it runs the heiden, a narrower offering hall that carries ritual offerings back toward the sanctuary. The pair occupies 108 square metres of single-storey timber, sheathed in copper that has gone the soft green of old coins.

The architect was Ikedaya Hisakichi, who lived from 1897 to 1956 and was born in Izumisano, a few stations up the coast. He trained at the Osaka Municipal Technical School, worked as an engineer for the Osaka prefectural government, and left in 1926 to open his own practice in the Nishi ward of the city. In 1929 he was appointed to the prefecture's survey committee for historic sites and monuments, which meant years of climbing around old temples with a notebook. That training shows in what he built here.

His portfolio runs through the region: the relocation design for the Onshi Kōdō lecture hall at Kanshinji temple in Kawachinagano, now an Important Cultural Property; the Myōōin hall at Narita-san in Neyagawa; the Tamamizu church hall of the Konkōkyō faith in Osaka city, itself a registered property. After the war he designed the reconstructed keep of Kishiwada Castle and the main and worship halls of Imamiya Ebisu Shrine.

Old Vocabulary, Deliberately Chosen

Everything worth looking at on this building happens in the metre or so below the eaves.

The bracketing is funahijiki, the plainest support in the Japanese carpenter's repertoire: a single boat-shaped block set on the column head, its underside curved, doing its job without announcing it. Osaka shrine architecture of the Edo period tended the opposite way, stacking bracket complexes three and four tiers deep and filling every gap with carved dragons. Ikedaya went backwards on purpose.

The gable is finished with inokosasu, a truss of paired rafters meeting at the apex with a strut beneath, visible in the triangular wall at each end of the ridge. It is an ancient form, the kind of detail associated with the oldest shrine architecture in the country. On a building raised in 1941 it is a quotation, not an inheritance.

Ornament appears in exactly one place. At the central bay, where the offering hall joins on, a kōryō beam arches across the opening and a kaerumata rests on top of it. The word means frog-leg, and the shape does splay outward at the base like a crouching frog; it is a strut that carries load while giving the eye something to settle on. Stand square in front of the hall and this is the bay you are looking through, straight down the axis toward the sanctuary. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the detailing as revivalist in character and credits it to the architect's skill, and that assessment is the substance of the registration.

The listing criterion applied was that the building serves as a model of design. Its register number is 27-710, from the eighty-eighth round of registrations.

What a Visit Actually Looks Like

The grounds are open and free. No admission is charged, no ticket window exists. The interiors are another matter: Sennan City asks visitors not to enter the worship hall or the sanctuary without permission, so this is a building you study from the front steps and from the gravel of the forecourt. Ten minutes of looking up will get you most of what the registration was about.

Directly in front of the hall grows the Meoto-kusu, a camphor whose two trunks rise from a single root system. Locals call the pair husband and wife. It frames the view of the facade in a way no architect planned, and it complicates photography of the building considerably.

Ono Shrine appears in the Engishiki, the tenth-century register of official shrines, and the deities enshrined here are Hikoitsuse no Mikoto and Emperor Jimmu. The alternate name Otakebi no Miya, the shrine of the war cry, comes from the account in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki in which Itsuse, elder brother of the future first emperor, was wounded by an arrow during the eastern campaign, was carried south along Osaka Bay, and roared his defiance near the mouth of the Onosato River before dying. The shrine moved to this site in 859. The 1941 hall you are standing in front of is the newest layer on very old ground.

The shrine office keeps roughly 9am to 5pm hours and there is parking for about twenty cars, though the approach road narrows badly near the end. From Tarui Station on the Nankai Main Line the walk takes about twenty-six minutes; the Sennan community bus on the southern loop stops at Onosato-naka, much closer. The approach itself is worth the time, running under old trees from the first torii past the second to the third.

Come on 15 January for the Okudashiki, a divination rite in which rice gruel is boiled in bamboo tubes labelled with crop names and the year's harvest is read from how much gruel enters each. Come in late May for the Hotaru Matsuri, when kagura dance and gagaku music are performed in front of this hall and himebotaru fireflies drift along the darkened approach. The great purification rites with their ring of woven reeds fall on 30 June and 31 December.