Sekizuji Temple Main Hall

Sekishin-ji Main Hall: A Muromachi Temple Building at the Old Yabase Port

In a residential block of Yabase, on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa in the city of Kusatsu, a single old wooden hall sits among houses and a nursery school. This is the main hall, or hondō, of Sekishin-ji, and it is close to all that survives of a temple whose origins reach back more than a thousand years. The building dates from the second half of the fourteenth century, around the Enbun era of 1356 to 1360, and it was first placed under national protection in 1907.

Temple tradition sets the founding in the year 788 and credits the monk Saichō (767–822), known after his death as Dengyō Daishi, the figure who established the Tendai school on Mount Hiei across the water. The account holds that while preparing to found the great monastery of Enryaku-ji, Saichō carved two images of Yakushi, the Buddha of healing, from a single piece of wood, and enshrined one of them here as the temple's principal image. This belongs to legend rather than documented record, and is best read as the temple's own origin story, but it links a modest site in a Kusatsu side street to the wider religious history of the lake.

What stands today is not that ancient foundation. The hall is a rebuilding. Both written records and the temple's tradition hold that it was reconstructed in 1359 by Ashikaga Yoshiakira, the second shogun of the Ashikaga line, after an earlier structure burned during the wars between the Northern and Southern Courts. The architecture agrees with that date.

Why the Hall Is an Important Cultural Property

The hall measures five bays across the front, about 11.5 meters, and four bays in depth, about 10.27 meters. It is a single-story building roofed in the hipped yosemune form and covered with formal ceramic tiling. It rests on a low earthen platform finished with a rounded plaster base and ringed by a narrow board veranda.

Architectural historians prize the building for the way it folds together two construction idioms. Its frame follows the wayō, the native Japanese manner that had shaped temple building for centuries: round columns, a steady horizontal rhythm, bracket sets of the degumi type above the pillars, and eaves carried on closely spaced rafters laid in two tiers. Onto that frame the carpenters worked clear features of the zenshūyō, the Zen style then arriving from China. The exterior drops the horizontal nageshi tie-beams of pure wayō work; the paneled sankarado doors hang on rounded straw-collar fittings called warabiza rather than ordinary pivots; and the corner pillars carry carved nosings, kibana, projecting from the head-tie beams.

This blending is a hallmark of fourteenth-century building, the period when the two traditions were combining most actively. A hall that can be dated with confidence to that moment, and that shows the mixture so plainly, is exactly the kind of evidence the designation exists to protect. The building was entered onto the national register on 28 August 1907, among the earlier waves of protected architecture in Japan.

Inside, a core of three bays by two forms the inner sanctuary, closed on its front and both sides by sliding lattice doors. A Sumeru altar of the Muromachi period stands at the rear, with a miniature shrine, a zushi, at the center and altar fittings to either side. Those flanking fittings and the shrine were added later, in the Edo period, so several centuries sit layered within the single room.

The Hall and the Port It Belonged To

The setting rewards a moment of attention even though the building cannot be entered. Yabase was no ordinary suburb. For centuries it ranked among the busiest ports on Lake Biwa, the point where travelers bound for Kyoto could cut their journey short by taking a boat straight across the water to Ōtsu instead of walking the long way around the southern end of the lake.

That crossing gave the Japanese language one of its most durable sayings. The renga poet Sōchō, active in the Muromachi period, wrote that although the boats from Yabase were fast, a traveler in a hurry ought to go around by the long bridge at Seta, because the wind pouring down from Mount Hiei made the open crossing dangerous. His verse is the source of the proverb isogaba maware, "if you are in a hurry, take the long way round," the close cousin of the English "more haste, less speed." Yabase also entered the Eight Views of Ōmi, the celebrated set of lake scenes later made famous by Hiroshige's woodblock prints, where it appears as "Returning Sails at Yabase." When the hall was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, the bustle of that port lay a short walk away.

Sekishin-ji is a working temple in private hands and is not generally open to the public. The precinct is fenced, and at present visitors cannot approach the hall or worship before it; the building can only be glimpsed from outside the enclosure. Anyone making the trip should treat it as a structure to view from the street, and should respect the privacy of the homes that now press close around it.

What to See Nearby

Because the hall itself is off limits, the surrounding area gives a day out firmer footing. Yabase Kihan-jima, an artificial island built off the old harbor in 1982, offers parkland and open views of the lake. Across the southern water at Ōtsu, several of the other Eight Views can be visited in full: the Seta no Karahashi bridge from the proverb, Ishiyama-dera with its celebrated harvest moon, and Mii-dera, also called Onjō-ji, with its evening bell. On the Kusatsu side, the Kusatsu-juku Honjin, a well-preserved official inn of the old Tōkaidō highway, is an easy addition to the route.