Koshigaya Hisaizu Shrine Chozuya

Four and a Half Square Metres of Carving

Koshigaya Hisaizu Shrine Temizusha (越谷久伊豆神社手水舎, also read chōzuya) is the purification pavilion at Hisaizu Shrine in Koshigaya City, Saitama Prefecture, built in the closing decades of the Edo period and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 13 March 2025. It stands on the east side of the approach, just south of the shrine's sacred dance stage, and covers 4.4 square metres. The national database records it together with the stone basin it shelters.

That basin carries an inscription dated 1849, and the building is understood to date from around the same moment. Koshigaya City describes the pavilion as a shelter built for a basin of that year, with construction assigned to the same late-Edo period; the Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the range 1830 to 1868 without pinning it further. No document has been published that fixes the year of the roof itself.

A temizusha is where visitors rinse hands and mouth before approaching the deity, and most are plain sheds. This one is not. The plan is one bay square under an irimoya roof, hipped below and gabled above, finished in kawarabō dōbanbuki, copper sheeting laid with raised battens that read as ribs running down the slope. Both gable ends carry a nokikarahafu, an undulating cusped gable set into the eaves, a form usually reserved for the entrance of a hall of some consequence.

The four columns lean inward. Splaying posts in this way, shihō-korobi, gives a small structure visual stability and resistance against racking, and the effect on the eye is of a building that grips the ground rather than perching on it.

Why a Washstand Reached the Register

The bracketing above those leaning columns is degumi, a single-step bracket complex that pushes the eaves outward, and the eaves themselves are nikennshige-daruki, double-tiered rafters set close together. Carving fills the remaining surfaces. Dragon heads carved fully in the round project diagonally from the corners. The brackets that support the projecting members are cut in kagobori, an openwork basket technique in which the timber is pierced through so light passes behind the design. The tie beams shaped into kōryō-gata kashiranuki, and the nakazonae struts between them, are worked in the same idiom. Set against the swelling curves of the cusped gables, the result is an object of unusual density for its size.

This is why the pavilion qualified under the second of the three registration criteria, being a model of design. Its two companions in the same registration split between the criteria: the main sanctuary of 1789 also came in as a model of design, while the sacred dance stage was accepted for contributing to the historic landscape. The Temizusha and the sanctuary were judged on their carving; the stage on its position.

Registration is not designation, and the difference is worth stating plainly. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated after strict selection, and altering them requires permission. The register, established in 1996, admits a far broader range of buildings over fifty years old and asks owners only to notify the government before major changes. All three Hisaizu Shrine buildings were recommended by the Council for Cultural Affairs in November 2024 and gazetted the following March, becoming the first shrine architecture in Koshigaya to enter the register.

Something about the date is worth holding onto. A structure this elaborate, built for the sole purpose of covering a water basin, was paid for in the 1840s by a community around Koshigaya-shuku, a post town on the Nikkō Kaidō. Kantō shrine carpentry of the late Edo period ran heavily to carving, and workshops in the region competed on ornament. The Temizusha is a small, complete example of that competition, applied to the least monumental building in the precinct.

Using It, and What Surrounds It

Purification comes before prayer, and the sequence is simple. Take the ladle in your right hand, pour water over the left; switch hands and rinse the right; pour into a cupped left hand to rinse the mouth, without touching the ladle to your lips; rinse the left hand once more, then tip the ladle upright so the remaining water runs down the handle. Do it slowly and you will find yourself standing under the carving for long enough to look at it, which is arguably the point of building a roof this good over a basin.

The precinct is freely open and no admission is charged. The pavilion sits beside the approach past the third torii, close to the wisteria arbour, so the exterior can be seen at any hour. The best angle for the carving is from below and slightly to the side, looking up into the eaves where the dragon heads project.

Late April brings the wisteria into flower and the precinct fills. Local record holds that the vine was brought from Nagareyama in Shimōsa Province in 1837 by a Koshigaya townsman and planted here; it became a prefectural natural monument in 1941, and the stock measures 7.3 metres around. The basin under this roof was inscribed twelve years after that planting, which places both within a single generation of townspeople.

The grounds hold more than the three registered buildings. Twelve subsidiary shrines stand behind the sanctuary and around the pond. Behind the main sanctuary is a replica of a large votive plaque presented by Hirata Atsutane, the Edo-period scholar of national learning, who is said to have lodged in the precinct. The approach and grounds are designated a scenic site by Koshigaya City and lie within a municipal environmental conservation area.

Koshigaya Station on the Tōbu Skytree Line is roughly twenty-five minutes on foot, Kita-Koshigaya Station about twenty. Buses from the east exit of Koshigaya Station stop at Hisaizu Jinja-mae; the Ibakyū service from Kita-Koshigaya toward Nodashi Station stops at Hisaizu Jinja-iriguchi. Three car parks hold 96 vehicles. No photography rules are published, though it is courteous to lower the camera during rites, and the shrine office answers questions on 048-962-7136.