Omi Shrine Automobile Purification Station (former Otsu

A Courthouse Porch That Became a Shrine Building

Omi Jingu Jidosha Kiyoharaijo (近江神宮自動車清祓所, also written Ōmi Jingū Jidōsha Kiyoharaijo), formerly the carriage porch of the Otsu Courthouse main building, stands in the precinct of Omi Jingu in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, was built in 1890, moved to the shrine in 1971, and was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property in 1998.

Every other registered building at this shrine was designed for it. This one was not. It began life as the entrance porch of the Otsu District Court, a government building put up in 1890, and it is half a century older than the shrine that now owns it.

When the courthouse was dismantled and rebuilt in 1971, the porch was salvaged and re-erected here. It now shelters the spot where cars are ritually purified, a service Japanese shrines commonly offer to new vehicles and their drivers. Twenty-six square metres, single storey, copper roof.

Reading Its Origins in the Details

The Otsu courthouse was built in a Japanese idiom rather than the Western manner that many Meiji-period government buildings adopted, which is why the porch settles into a shrine precinct without looking like an intruder. Someone unfamiliar with its history could easily take it for part of the original 1940 scheme.

Two details give the game away. The first is structural: each corner post is flanked by a pair of supplementary struts, two to a corner, a doubling that is unusual and that suits a porch designed to stand alone at the front of a public building. The second is heraldic. The gable carries a gently convex mukuri profile, and the pendant hanging beneath it is cut in the bat-shaped komori-gegyo form. Set into that pendant is a chrysanthemum crest, the emblem of the imperial house and, by extension, of the Meiji state whose court once sat behind this porch.

The building was registered on 9 October 1998 with registration number 25-0088, under the criterion that it serves as a model of design. Its date is recorded as 1890 with relocation in 1971, a two-part entry that acknowledges both halves of its life.

What to Look For

Go and find the chrysanthemum. It sits on the gable pendant, facing outward, and once you have seen it the building rearranges itself in your mind: not a shrine structure at all, but a piece of Meiji officialdom that survived by being useful.

Then step back and count the struts at the corners. Against the single columns used almost everywhere else in the precinct, the paired braces read as visibly sturdier, and they explain how a porch meant to be seen from three sides was made to stand up.

The purification station is outdoors and can be seen at any time during shrine hours, 6:00 to 18:00, at no charge. Photography of the exterior is unrestricted. Do give way if a car and priest are actually using it; this is working equipment, not an exhibit.

The shrine is nine minutes on foot from Omi-jingu-mae station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line, and has 200 free parking spaces outside the New Year period. Since drivers are the natural congregation for this particular building, arriving by car is not the wrong way to see it.