Enman-in Shinden

A Consort's Apartments, Rebuilt Beside Lake Biwa

Enman-in Shinden (圓満院宸殿, also written 円満院宸殿 and romanised Enman'in Shinden) is the ceremonial hall of Enman-in Monzeki in Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, completed in 1619 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 31 July 1902.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs files it under pre-modern residential architecture, not temple architecture. That single administrative detail explains almost everything about the building. It was never designed as a place of worship.

According to the temple's own account, the hall was raised inside the Kyoto imperial palace precinct in 1619 for Tokugawa Masako, daughter of the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, in preparation for her formal entry to the palace as consort of Emperor Go-Mizunoo. Masako is better known by the title she later took, Tofukumon'in. Her marriage was the instrument by which the new shogunate bound itself to the throne, and the rooms built for her carried the weight of that arrangement.

Nearly three decades later the building was given away. Temple records place the transfer in 1647, when Empress Meisho, the daughter born to Go-Mizunoo and Masako, granted the structure to Enman-in. Carpenters took it apart, carted the pieces east over the hills to Otsu, and put it back together on ground beside Onjoji, the great Tendai monastery usually called Miidera.

Its dimensions have not changed since: 19.7 metres along the ridge, 15.8 metres from front to back, a single storey under an irimoya roof (hipped above, gabled at the ends). The roof covering is kokerabuki, overlapping shingles of thin split wood rather than tile. On a building this large, shingle is an expensive and deliberately aristocratic choice, and it marks the hall out immediately from the tiled temple halls next door.

Why the Hall Was Designated

The 1902 listing (designation number 00236) came remarkably early, in the first generation of Japanese heritage protection under the Meiji government's preservation law for shrines and temples. Very few buildings anywhere in Japan were recognised that soon.

The reason is scarcity. Palace residential architecture of the early seventeenth century has survived poorly. Fire, dynastic rebuilding and the routine dismantling of imperial residences destroyed most of it, and what remains tends to survive precisely because it was given to a temple and thereby removed from the cycle of palace reconstruction. Enman-in Shinden is one of that small group.

The interior follows shoin-zukuri, the formal reception style that governed elite Japanese building from the late medieval period onward. Its vocabulary is a decorated alcove, staggered shelving, a built-in writing bay and a sequence of rooms graded by rank, so that a visitor's social standing determined how far into the building they were permitted to walk. The first room, the highest in that sequence, is the one shown to visitors today.

Two further elements are covered by the designation as tsuketari, subsidiary items listed alongside the main structure: the entrance hall (genkan), counted as one building, and two shishiguchi, the sculpted terminals that finish a roof ridge in high-status architecture. Attached listings of this kind signal that the surviving assembly, not just the main box of the hall, is considered historically intact.

The building also had a second career that has nothing to do with either palace or temple. In early 1869 the newly created Otsu prefectural office was installed inside the Shinden, and the administration of what became Shiga Prefecture was conducted from these rooms until a purpose-built office opened in 1888. Few Important Cultural Properties in Japan have served as a working government headquarters.

What to Look For

Approach from the entrance side and the first thing that registers is the chrysanthemum crest displayed at the genkan, the imperial emblem that announces Enman-in's status as a monzeki, a temple whose abbacy was reserved for members of the imperial family. Enman-in was one of three such houses attached to the Onjoji lineage.

Inside, the room to seek out is the first room, where a raised seat is pointed out as the place Emperor Go-Mizunoo is said to have occupied. The tradition is not documented to modern standards, and the temple presents it as tradition, which is the honest way to take it.

The sliding-door paintings are attributed to artists of the Kano school, the workshop that supplied both shogunate and court through the Edo period. What hangs in the room now is largely high-resolution reproduction, the originals having been withdrawn for conservation. Visitors expecting to stand in front of four-hundred-year-old pigment should know this in advance; the arrangement is common in Japanese temples and is not concealed.

Step to the south side and the garden opens up. Enman-in's garden carries its own national listing as both a Place of Scenic Beauty and a Historic Site, and local tradition credits its design to Soami, the Muromachi-period connoisseur associated with several celebrated Kyoto gardens. It is a pond garden meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda rather than walked through, which is exactly how the Shinden's south rooms were designed to be used. Mountain cherry comes in spring; the forest green tree frog, a protected species, breeds around the water in early summer.

Photography inside the hall is subject to the temple's own rules, which can change with the season and with any special display; ask at the reception desk rather than assuming. The Otsu-e Art Museum in the same precinct, opened in 1971, holds the principal public collection of Otsu-e, the boldly painted folk pictures sold to travellers on the Tokaido highway at the Otsu post town. The same ticket covers both museum and Shinden.

Admission runs 500 yen for adults and 300 yen for high school students, with junior high school students and younger admitted free, and the precinct is open daily from 9:00 with reception closing around 16:30. From Kyoto the journey is short: take the Keihan Ishiyama Sakamoto line to Otsu Shiyakusho-mae and walk about five minutes, or ride a bus from JR Otsu Station to the Miidera Enman'in-mae stop. There is free parking. Onjoji itself is a few minutes' walk away, which makes a combined visit straightforward.

One point of context worth knowing. The registered owner of the building today is the religious corporation Daikoji, following an auction of the temple's assets in 2009 during a period of financial difficulty. The precinct remained open to visitors throughout and continues to be maintained.