Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence

About the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence (天理教北阪分教会教職舎, Tenrikyō Kitasaka Bunkyōkai Kyōshokusha) is a three-storey timber building of around 1939 in Katayamacho, Kashiwara City, Osaka Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005.

It stands on the grounds of a Tenrikyo church, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that it began life as a private house. The builders took a two-storey home, set a lookout storey on top and finished the composition with an octagonal rooftop tower. The footprint is 306 square metres, the largest of the four registered structures on the site.

Why the Kyōshokusha was registered

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence was added to the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on July 12, 2005, as registration number 27-0317. The criterion cited is that the structure would be difficult to reproduce.

That judgement rests on the walls. From outside, the Kyōshokusha reads as a tiled-roof house mixing Japanese and Western features, yet its walls are concrete formed around a special wire mesh that the agency records as the "Mora-system structural mesh" (モーラ式構成網). The agency says it knows of no comparable example.

The register still classes the building as timber construction. Published sources do not describe the gauge of the mesh or how the walls were built up, so the technique itself remains only partly documented.

What to look for at the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence

A lookout storey and an octagonal tower

The feature that gives the Kyōshokusha away from a distance is the octagonal tower on the roof. Because a lookout storey sits on the two-storey house and the tower rises from that, the building climbs in clear steps. Kashiwara City describes the white tower poking above the neighbouring roofs, which makes it the easiest part to spot in this low-rise district.

Green-glazed tiles, gables and a cornice

The roof is covered with green-glazed tiles rather than the usual grey ones. It also carries Chidori-hafu, the triangular dormer gables of Japanese roofs, while a Western-style cornice runs along the top of the walls. Setting those two vocabularies side by side on a single facade is what the agency means when it calls the exterior a varied blend of Japanese and Western design.

A discrepancy between sources

Kashiwara City describes the roof of the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence as ordinary interlocking tile and credits it with board-style eaves and balustrade-like ornament beneath the upper windows. The agency lists green-glazed tiles for this building and assigns the eaves and balustrade ornament to the detached wing. This article follows the agency.

Visiting the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Clergy Residence is not open to the public and its interior cannot be visited. The grounds are private, so there is no access beyond the gate.

What you can see depends on the view from the surrounding streets. The octagonal tower does show above the rooftops, as the city notes; how much of the gables and cornice is visible from public land has not been confirmed in published sources. Keep any photography to the street and respect the quiet of the neighbourhood.