Ganshoji Temple Kihinshitsu Guest Hall

A Study Said to Have Received the Lord of Saga

The Ganshoji Temple Kihinshitsu Guest Hall (願正寺貴賓室, Ganshōji Kihinshitsu) in Gofukumotomachi, Saga City, Saga Prefecture, is a guest building dating from the early eighteenth century, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 14 October 2021. It is a single-storey structure with a plain gabled roof of pantiles, standing to the north-east of the temple's Main Hall, with a building area of 109 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a study of quiet quality, traditionally said to have served as the reception room for visits by the lord of the Saga domain.

Kihinshitsu means "room for distinguished guests," and strictly the name belongs to only one part of the building. On the west is a ten-mat formal study, the guest room proper. On the east lies a larger inner room of twenty mats. The two sit side by side under a single roof.

The temple's published chronology dates the building to 1710; the national registration record says only "early eighteenth century." Either way, the rooms were fitted out about a decade after the Main Hall was finished. When the temple's residential quarters were rebuilt in 1934, Saga City records note, the inner room was kept. The temple also lists a renovation in 2010.

How the Rooms Are Arranged

The Ganshoji Temple Kihinshitsu Guest Hall was registered as a building that sets a standard in design. The case rests on how the rooms are put together and on the finish of the joinery.

Each side of the pair of rooms is wrapped by a different kind of passage. To the north runs a corridor half a bay wide, the working route for people coming and going. To the south is a matted gallery a full bay wide, known as a saya-no-ma or "sheath room," which wraps the formal rooms in a second band of tatami. The difference in width separates the space where guests were received from the space where attendants waited.

Where one zone meets another, there is ornament. The division between the rooms and the matted gallery is marked by transoms carved to resemble jointed bamboo and by cedar sliding doors with painted panels. On the room side, the transoms are of the fine comb-like type called Osa-ranma, their slender vertical slats set close together. The alcove has a Tokobashira left with patches of bark on its faces, and the sill beneath it is finished in lacquer. None of this is showy. It is the choice of timber and the care in finishing that tell you who the room was built for.

The Main Hall was where the congregation gathered for worship. This building, by contrast, handled the temple's formal dealings with the domain, and the difference in the two buildings' character follows from that difference in purpose.

What to Notice

Most of what matters here is indoors. Seated in the ten-mat guest room, you face the alcove, with its bark-edged post and lacquered sill. Look up and the fine vertical lines of the comb transoms on the room side answer the knotted rhythm of the bamboo transoms facing the gallery: two kinds of screen, deliberately paired.

The painted cedar doors deserve attention too. They close off the formal rooms from the gallery and, with the transoms above, frame the boundary between the two.

The building's position matters as well. The Ganshoji Temple Kihinshitsu Guest Hall is the northernmost of the three buildings strung along the east side of the precinct, beyond the Main Entrance and the Great Hall. It is the room furthest from the front door: exactly where you would put your most important guest.

Visiting the Guest Hall

The building is used for receiving visitors and for temple business, and its interior is not open to the public. The temple website gives no procedure for viewing it and announces no special openings.

From the grounds only the exterior can be seen, and because the guest hall sits behind the Great Hall, only part of its roof and walls is visible. Anyone hoping to see the rooms would have to ask the temple directly, with no guarantee of a yes. The area around the building adjoins the temple offices, so please do not wander in.

Directions and general visiting conditions are covered on the Ganshoji Temple page.