Omi Shrine Shinsensho Toro

Nine Square Metres Joining Two Building Campaigns

Omi Jingu Shinsensho Noboriro (近江神宮神饌所登廊, also written Ōmi Jingū Shinsensho 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.

It rises from the middle of the rear passage of the kagura hall and climbs by steps to the east door of the hall where sacred food offerings are prepared. That door is a mairado, a sliding leaf faced with closely spaced battens, and it has been there since the offerings hall was built in 1940.

Nine square metres of floor area, which makes this the second smallest registered structure at the shrine after the treasury storehouse.

A Roof That Changes Form Halfway

The corridor is plainly finished, its exterior clad in vertical boarding, and it would be easy to describe it as merely functional. The roof says otherwise.

Where the corridor meets a building at either end, it is gabled. Over the stair itself the treatment changes: the ceiling becomes a battened board sao-buchi ceiling and the roof above it is a single slope. Three roof conditions in nine square metres, each following what is happening beneath it, and the shift gives the exterior a variety that a single unbroken roof would not have produced.

The corridor also does something the shrine's chronology makes interesting. The offerings hall belongs to the first campaign of 1940, the kagura hall to the second of 1944. This little stair is the piece of construction that joined them, and it was built as part of the later campaign. Its east door was already forty-eight months old when the corridor arrived to meet it.

Registration came on 9 October 1998 under number 25-0079, with the criterion that it serves as a model of design. The shrine was founded in 1940 to enshrine Emperor Tenji, who moved the capital to Otsu in 667, and the complex was planned within the Home Ministry's Shrine Bureau by Sunami Takashi and Tani Shigeo.

What to Look For

From the paths in the northern part of the grounds, trace the roofline where the corridor leaves the kagura hall. The change from gable to single slope and back again is the whole story of the building, legible from outside without entering anything.

Compare it with the assembly hall stair a little further north, which handles a similar job but was given a fire door and a tiled fire wall. Two corridors, two problems, two answers. Reading them as a pair tells you more than either does alone.

The corridor links working buildings and is closed to visitors. Photography from outside is unrestricted, and the grounds are open 6:00 to 18:00 without charge.

Getting there: Omi-jingu-mae station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line is nine minutes away on foot, roughly half of it inside the grounds. Drivers have 200 free spaces outside the New Year period.