Omi Shrine Assembly Hall Corridor

The Only Firebreak in a Chain of Corridors

Omi Jingu Sanshujo Noboriro (近江神宮参集所登廊, also written Ōmi Jingū Sanshūjo Noborirō), a covered stair corridor at Omi Jingu in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, was built in 1944 and was placed on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 1998.

The northern half of the shrine precinct climbs a hillside, and its buildings are strung together by corridors rather than left standing apart. From the sacred food hall and the kagura hall, a chain of passages and stairs runs north through the assembly hall and the shrine office all the way to the priests' residence at the top. This corridor sits roughly at the midpoint of that chain.

It is small, twelve square metres of floor area, and it does one thing the other links do not.

A Fire Compartment Written into the Architecture

Halfway up the stair, on the landing, the builders installed a fire door and carried a fire wall up through the roof. The wall rises above the roof line in the manner of an udatsu, the projecting fire-baffle familiar from merchant townscapes in Japan, and its top is capped with roof tiles rather than the copper sheeting used everywhere else on this building. Copper melts. Tile does not.

Nowhere else in the whole run of corridors was such a barrier provided. Should fire break out in the lower group of buildings, this is the point at which it was meant to stop. That the shrine's designers chose to solve the problem visibly, with a tiled ridge breaking the line of a copper roof, rather than hiding the measure inside the structure, tells you something about how they worked.

The corridor was registered on 9 October 1998 under registration number 25-0081 and the criterion that it serves as a model of design. It belongs to the second construction campaign of 1944; the shrine itself was founded in 1940 to enshrine Emperor Tenji, and the complex was planned by the Home Ministry's Shrine Bureau under Sunami Takashi and Tani Shigeo.

What to Look For

Follow the roofline from below and the break is obvious once you know to expect it: copper, then a short stretch of tile standing slightly proud, then copper again. Most visitors read it as a decorative accent. It is a piece of fire engineering.

The corridor is part of the shrine's working area and is not open to visitors, but the roof and the raised fire wall can be picked out from the paths in the northern part of the grounds, and there is no restriction on photographing from outside. The grounds are open daily from 6:00 to 18:00 without charge.

Anyone interested in how the shrine handles the slope should walk the northern zone slowly. Three of the registered structures here are corridors of one kind or another, each solving a different problem of level change, and reading them together is more rewarding than looking at any one alone.

Getting there: Omi-jingu-mae station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line is a nine-minute walk away, and the shrine has 200 free parking spaces outside the New Year period.