Seigakuin Kuri

A Temple Wing With the Face of a Townhouse

Seigakuin Kuri (清学院庫裏, also written Seigakuin Kuri, the priests' quarters of Seigakuin), standing at Kita-hatagocho-nishi in Sakai Ward, Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, dates from the late Edo period and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2002.

A kuri is the residential and working wing of a Japanese temple: kitchen, living rooms, the place where a priest's household actually happens. At Seigakuin the wing wraps around the small Fudo hall on two sides, meeting it along the south and the east, so that the plan takes an L shape. The whole site covers 126 square metres. The quarters account for 75 square metres of building area, which is generous only by comparison with the 24-square-metre hall next door.

The entrance sits on the south side, along what is structurally the flank of the Fudo hall, and takes the form of a shikidai genkan, a raised boarded step of the kind normally reserved for receiving guests of standing. Behind it lie two rooms of eight tatami mats each. South of the entrance the floor drops to an earth-floored doma, the working surface of any Japanese house of the period.

Then comes the part that gives the building its character. Where the wing extends south from the Fudo hall, the carpenter built a tsushi nikai, a low half-storey under the roof, and pierced the wall with a mushiko-mado, the plastered lattice window that any resident of Sakai or Kyoto would read instantly as the mark of a merchant townhouse. Seen from the street, a section of this temple looks like the home of a shopkeeper.

The School Called Seikodo

From the late Edo period into the early Meiji years, these rooms held a terakoya, one of the private neighbourhood schools where commoners' children learned to read, write and use the abacus. It went by the name Seikodo. The teaching was not organised in classes; pupils worked at their own pace on whatever their family thought useful, which in a port city like Sakai meant practical texts as well as classical ones. The exhibits on site include primers of the oraimono type, model letters used as reading material, alongside works such as the Thousand Character Classic.

One pupil made the building nationally significant. Kawaguchi Ekai was born in 1866 in Sakai's Yamabushi-cho, now part of Kita-hatagocho-nishi, and entered Seikodo at the age of six by the traditional count. After the 1872 education ordinance he moved to a new state school, left at twelve to work in the family cooperage, and kept studying anyway, taking classical Chinese at a private academy run by Tsuchiya Hoshu. He went up to Tokyo in 1888, took ordination as an Obaku Zen monk at twenty-five, and grew dissatisfied with Buddhist scripture as it survived in Chinese translation.

That dissatisfaction took him to Tibet, then closed to foreigners. He set out in 1897, crossed a Himalayan pass from Nepal in 1900, and reached Lhasa the following year, the first Japanese to do so. The journey lasted close to six years and produced the book known in English as Three Years in Tibet. He returned to the region in 1904 and spent nearly a decade more in India, Nepal and Tibet. Sakai City records Seigakuin as the only surviving building connected with him.

Registration, and What to Notice on a Visit

The quarters were registered on 21 August 2002 under number 27-0189, with the announcement published on 3 September, in the same round of listings that covered the Fudo hall and the gate. The criterion applied was the one for structures that cannot easily be reproduced. Sakai City owns the building. In April 2023 the three structures were also designated as buildings that shape the historic character of their surroundings.

The site has been open since 2011 as the Seigakuin branch of the Sakai City Machiya Museum. Hours run from 10:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30, and the site closes on Tuesdays, shifting to the next weekday when a public holiday falls on one, and from 29 December to 3 January. Admission costs 100 yen, dropping to 80 yen for groups of twenty or more, with free entry for junior high school students and younger, Sakai residents aged 65 and over, and visitors with disabilities and their carers on presentation of a certificate. A ticket covering all three Machiya Museum sites is 700 yen.

Look at the roofline before going in. The Fudo hall's gable is raised one step above the quarters, which is how a single continuous interior manages to present itself outside as two buildings. Then find the mushiko-mado on the southern extension. Standing at the gate you can see, in one view, a temple hall and a merchant's upper window sharing a roof.

Inside, the two eight-mat rooms are laid out as they were when children studied here, with materials on Kawaguchi Ekai and on nineteenth-century schooling. Certain exhibits may not be photographed, so check with staff first. There is no car park; the Takasu-jinja tram stop on the Hankai line lies 300 metres east and Shichido Station on the Nankai Main Line 300 metres west, each about five minutes on foot. The Yamaguchi Residence, an Important Cultural Property under the same museum, is around 620 metres away and makes an obvious second stop.