Seianji Temple Guest Hall

One Hall, an Important Cultural Property since 1993

Seianji Temple Guest Hall (盛安寺客殿, Seianji Kyakuden) stands at Sakamoto 1-chome, Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, listed as an Important Cultural Property on 17 August 1993. The listing is as an Important Cultural Property, not a National Treasure, and the owner is the temple.

The quantity is one building.

Otsu City records that the hall has a hip-and-gable roof on its south side and a gabled roof on its north, both covered in pantiles.

One Page, Two Different Dates

A single record gives two answers to when the hall was built.

The heading of Otsu City's page places it in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

The body of the same page says it is thought to date from the first half of that century.

Latter half against first half: half a century apart, within one page, between the heading and the text.

With the Imojiya site finds, the Agency gave the early part of the middle Jomon and the city the central part. Those are two separate records.

At the Haba residence, the Agency and the city differed in how closely they fixed the date. Here the disagreement sits inside one record, and which is right wants checking by hand.

The Roof Takes a Different Form North and South

Front and back of one building carry different roofs.

Otsu City records a hip-and-gable roof on the south side and a gabled roof on the north.

The hip-and-gable form is gabled above and hipped below; the gabled form has two slopes, like a book laid face down.

Seen from the south and seen from the north, the outline of the roof changes.

At the Raigoji main hall in Matsusaka, the outer sanctuary was hipped and the inner pyramidal. That is a compound hall joining two buildings front and back.

Here one building carries two forms, south and north. The tiling is the same on both sides.

Two Lines of Evidence Fix the Date

When the hall was built is reasoned from two comparisons.

Otsu City writes that from comparison with nearby guest halls at two other temples, and from the date of the painted panels, the building is thought to be of the first half of the seventeenth century.

One line is comparison with buildings of the same kind nearby. The other is the date of the paintings inside.

With the Jokomyoji site map, two conditions narrowed an undated document to two years: the state of the ground and the movements of a named man. That reasoning runs from events.

Here the reasoning runs from two objects: other buildings, and the paintings the building holds.

Of those paintings, the city records that the sliding panels of the room facing the garden carry work of a leading school of painters. The garden itself is listed by Shiga Prefecture as a place of scenic beauty.

Visiting

The hall stands at Sakamoto 1-chome, Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, owned by the temple.

Otsu City provides its account of the building in English, Chinese and Korean as well.

At the former Shuseikan machinery factory and the Jokomyoji site map, two national systems overlapped, a structure and a historic site. Here it is a national listing for the building and a prefectural one for the garden.

A national designation and a prefectural designation sit side by side within one temple.

It is a temple building, and access follows the temple's own arrangements. Check before travelling.