Hiyoshi Taisha East Shrine Main Hall and Worship Hall

The Older Half of Hiyoshi Taisha

The Hiyoshi Taisha East Shrine Main Hall and Worship Hall stand in Sakamoto-honmachi, Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture, and date from the Momoyama period: the Main Hall was listed as an Important Cultural Property in 1901 and elevated to National Treasure in 1961, while the Worship Hall became an Important Cultural Property in 1964. The deity here is Ōyamakui no Kami, named in the eighth-century Kojiki as the god who dwells on Mount Hie, the mountain rising directly behind the buildings.

Hiyoshi Taisha starts with this deity. Worship centred on Hachiōjiyama, the peak treated as the god's body, and a lower shrine grew at the foot of the slope. The deity of the western sanctuary arrived later, brought from Yamato during the reign of Emperor Tenji. For much of the medieval period the western compound outranked the eastern one, which was then called Ninomiya, the second shrine; the older order has since been restored.

The present Main Hall was raised in 1595 and the Worship Hall in 1596. Both belong to the reconstruction that followed the burning of Mount Hiei in 1571, and both came nine years after their counterparts on the western side of the precinct.

Reading the Differences Against the West Shrine

The Main Hall is five bays by three, roofed in cypress bark, and built in the Hiyoshi-zukuri form: pent roofs on the front and two sides of the core, none at the rear. Seen head-on it closely resembles the Main Hall of the western sanctuary.

The differences are in the detail. Ōtsu city's cultural properties office points to the rear floor here being set a step higher than its western counterpart. The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary goes further, listing the bracket blocks, the shape of the rear veranda and the placement of the windows as points where the two diverge. Two buildings of one type, put up a decade apart, record the choices of different carpenters, and walking from one to the other makes those choices legible.

What the pair share is the treatment beneath the floor. Both sit high, and both have fittings under the floor for enshrining Buddhist images. The Agency's commentary flags this as a distinctive product of Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. In the centuries when this shrine was run alongside the Tendai monastery on the mountain above, the space under the sanctuary floor belonged to the buddhas.

The Hiyoshi-zukuri form itself is thought to preserve a plan recorded in Heian-period texts as sangen-sanmen, three bays with three faces. The Hiyoshi Taisha East Shrine Main Hall is that old arrangement rebuilt with Momoyama carpentry.

The Worship Hall and the Layout Around It

The Worship Hall is three bays square, single-storeyed, hip-and-gable roofed and entered from the gable end (Tsumairi), with cypress bark above and no walls on any side. Its coffered ceiling is finely gridded and flat, where the western sanctuary's equivalent is raised at the centre.

Visitors reaching the Hiyoshi Taisha East Shrine Main Hall and Worship Hall usually notice the geometry before anything else. Pass through the tower gate and the building facing you is not the Main Hall but the worship hall of the auxiliary Juge Shrine, with its own sanctuary behind it. The eastern sanctuary's two buildings sit at an angle to that line. The axis of the approach shifts as you walk it, and the effect registers on the ground far better than on a plan.

Once a year the space in front of these buildings becomes a stage. On the night of 12 April, portable shrines carried up to the mountaintop sanctuary in early March are brought back down a steep path by torchlight, and rites begin at the eastern sanctuary around 9:20 p.m. The ground before the Main Hall is where that descent ends.

Visiting

Both buildings can be seen from outside once you have entered the precinct. Admission is 500 yen for adults, 300 yen for junior and senior high school students, free for younger children, and 450 yen per person for groups of thirty or more; drivers settle this at the east reception desk. The eastern compound lies toward the far end of the grounds, roughly a twenty-minute walk from the red torii by way of the western sanctuary, passing the trailhead for the mountaintop sanctuary on the way.

General hours run 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and the two main compounds open earlier, at 6:00 a.m. from April to September and 7:00 a.m. from October to March. Neither the Main Hall nor the Worship Hall admits visitors inside, so viewing is from the surrounding ground. Photography in the precinct is not restricted.

Toilets are located behind the amulet office of the eastern compound. A circuit of the whole precinct takes around forty minutes, rising to about ninety during the autumn colour season, when some three thousand maples turn between mid and late November.

By rail, allow about ten minutes on foot from Sakamoto-Hieizanguchi Station on the Keihan Ishiyama Sakamoto Line, or about twenty from Hieizan-Sakamoto Station on the JR Kosei Line. Parking for around fifty cars is free except in November. Coaches cannot enter and are directed to the Ōmiyagawa or Tōshōgū-shita visitor car parks.