Abandoned Temple Site in Minami Shiga Town

Minami-Shiga-cho Temple Ruins: A Vanished Temple Read From Its Stones

A block of granite roughly 1.5 by 1.8 meters sits at the center of a quiet hillside park in the northern part of Otsu. Its upper face has been ground flat, and two recesses are cut into it: a shallow circular seat about 83 centimeters across, and at the seat's center a deeper hole about 21 centimeters wide and 18 centimeters deep. This is a pagoda foundation stone. From its size, archaeologists estimate that the pagoda it once carried stood close to 30 meters tall.

The pagoda is long gone, and so is the temple it belonged to. What remains is the ground plan, recovered by excavation, and a name problem that researchers spent decades working through. The temple has no recorded title, so it is known today simply by the place where it stood: the Minami-Shiga-cho Temple Ruins.

The site is a National Historic Site, designated in 1957. For visitors interested in the early history of Japanese Buddhism, it offers something unusual: a chance to stand inside the footprint of a 7th-century temple and see how much can be reconstructed from foundation stones and broken roof tiles alone.

A Temple Beside a Short-Lived Capital

In 667 the imperial court moved from Asuka, in present-day Nara Prefecture, to the western shore of Lake Biwa. Prince Naka-no-Oe took the throne the following year as Emperor Tenji, and his new seat became known as the Omi Otsu Palace. It did not last. After Tenji died in 672, a succession conflict known as the Jinshin War broke out, the court returned south, and Otsu lost its role as a capital after barely five years.

Several Buddhist temples were built on the slopes around the palace during or shortly after this brief period. The Minami-Shiga-cho temple was one of them. It stood on a terrace above the lake, about 750 meters north of the palace site, roughly aligned with it on a north-south line. Pottery and roof tiles recovered from the ground show that the temple remained in use far longer than the capital itself, from the late 7th century, the period known as Hakuho, until the end of the Heian period some five centuries later.

The temple was first investigated in 1928, with a second and larger campaign beginning in 1938. Both excavations were carried out partly to pin down the location of the Otsu Palace, which had not yet been firmly identified. The digging exposed the bases of a pagoda, golden halls, a lecture hall and monks' quarters, confirming that a substantial temple had stood here.

Its identity, however, stayed open. For years the building was proposed as Sufukuji, the temple traditionally credited to Emperor Tenji, or as Bonshakuji, founded later by Emperor Kanmu. The historical record eventually pointed elsewhere. An old chronicle, the Fuso Ryakki, places Sufukuji to the northwest of the palace, and a separate temple site found in the hills of nearby Shigasato fits that description better. Because another source indicates that Sufukuji and Bonshakuji stood close together, the temple at Minami-Shiga is now treated as an unnamed foundation, and its designation uses only the modern place name.

Reading the Plan: A Kawaradera-Style Layout

The arrangement of buildings recovered from the site belongs to a type called the Kawaradera-style layout. Inside the central gate stood a pagoda on the east side and a west golden hall facing it on the west. Beyond them, along the central axis, came the main golden hall and then the lecture hall, with monks' quarters wrapped around the lecture hall on three sides.

This plan takes its name from Kawaradera in Asuka, a temple connected to Emperor Tenji's mother. The match is informative. Early interpretations of the Minami-Shiga site read the two structures flanking the gate as a pair of pagodas, and the northernmost building as a refectory. Later study revised both readings, identifying the western structure as a golden hall and the refectory as monks' quarters. The corrected plan placed the temple firmly within a known architectural family rather than leaving it as an isolated case.

One construction detail is worth noting on the ground. The platforms supporting the pagoda, the west golden hall and the main hall were not faced with cut stone but with roof tiles laid in stacked courses, a technique known as a tile-built podium. It is a method seen at a number of early temples and is one of the features that helped place this site in its period.

The Foundation Stone and the Scorpion Tile

Two things reward a slow look at this site. The first is the pagoda foundation stone in the center of the park. The circular seat cut into its flat upper surface received the base of the central pillar, and the smaller hole at the very center held a deposit of Buddhist relics. The stone visible today was found at a nearby private house during the 1928 excavation and moved into the park, so it does not sit in its original position, but its proportions are genuine, and they are the basis for the estimate of a pagoda close to 30 meters in height.

The second is a roof tile that appears nowhere else. Most ancient Japanese temples finished their eaves with round tiles bearing a lotus flower seen from above. The Minami-Shiga temple also used a square eave tile decorated with a lotus viewed from the side. The resulting pattern reminded later observers of a scorpion, and the tile is known by the nickname scorpion-pattern tile. Because the design is unique to this site, it has become a marker that ties scattered finds back to this single temple.

The tiles themselves came from close by. About 300 meters west of the temple, a group of kilns at the Hannokihara site fired the roof tiles used here. Studying the tiles from kiln to building has let researchers trace how production and supply worked for a single temple, which is rare for a site of this age.

Visiting and the Surrounding Area

The ruins occupy a terraced clearing on a slope facing Lake Biwa. Part of the site is laid out as a small park, with the pagoda foundation stone and the base stones of the corridor and monks' quarters left in place, along with an explanatory board. There is no admission fee and no fixed opening time, since the park is open ground rather than a managed facility.

The closest station is Minami-shiga on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line, a walk of roughly seven to ten minutes uphill to the west. There is no dedicated parking, so public transport is the easier choice. The site is compact and can be seen in twenty to thirty minutes.

It also sits within an easy circuit of related sites. Omi Jingu, a shrine dedicated to Emperor Tenji, is a short distance away, as is the Omi Otsu Palace Nishikori site, the location of the palace itself. The remains of Sufukuji, the temple once confused with this one, lie in the hills not far off. Together these places make it possible to walk through the physical traces of Otsu's brief moment as the capital of Japan in a single half-day.