Temple Bell

A Bell Signed in Mirror Writing

Cast into the inner wall of a bronze bell at the Sagawa Art Museum, three short lines of script run backwards. Read them in a mirror and they resolve into twenty-four characters: the bell of the West Hōdō-in at Enryaku-ji on Mt. Hiei, cast with full devotion on the ninth day of the eighth month of Tennan 2. That year corresponds to 858, deep in the Heian period, and the reversed lettering is part of why specialists have prized this bell for more than a century.

A bonshō is a Japanese temple bell. It has no clapper hanging inside; a monk swings a suspended wooden beam against the outer wall, and the bronze answers with a long, low tone that carries across a valley. Bells of this kind marked the hours and summoned monks to ritual long before clocks reached Japan. This one was made for a hall on the mountain that has been the spiritual centre of Tendai Buddhism since the eighth century, and it now stands in a museum gallery beside Lake Biwa, roughly an hour from Kyoto.

From a Lost Hall on Mt. Hiei

The inscription names the West Hōdō-in, a hall in the Saitō or western precinct of Enryaku-ji. According to early records the hall was founded by the monk Eryō at the wish of Emperor Montoku, in the years spanning the Kashō and Tennan eras of the mid-ninth century. The Hōdō-in itself has long since vanished from the mountain, so the bell is now the most tangible survivor of that vanished building.

How the bell left Mt. Hiei and entered a private collection is not recorded in the sources that describe it today. What is certain is its present home: the Sagawa Art Museum in Moriyama, on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, where it is held by SG Holdings. Among a collection otherwise built around modern Japanese painting, bronze sculpture and tea ceramics, the bell is the single object designated a National Treasure, and the only National Treasure bell anywhere in Shiga Prefecture.

Sixth Oldest of Its Kind

Japan keeps a short list of bells that carry a date in their own inscription. Counting from the oldest, the line begins with the bell at Myōshin-ji in Kyoto, dated 698, followed by the Kōfuku-ji bell in Nara of 727, the Tsurugi Shrine bell in Fukui of 770, and an excavated bell from the Narita area of 774. The Sagawa bell falls sixth in that sequence. For an object whose exact birth year can be read rather than guessed, surviving from 858 places it among the earliest cast bells the country still possesses.

It earned its first national recognition in 1906 and was raised to National Treasure status in 1953, under the postwar cultural property law. The grounds are partly historical and partly artistic. The lettering inside, set in elegant reversed script, is admired as calligraphy in its own right, and the shape of the bell speaks to a casting tradition already a century and a half old when it was poured. Its rows of small bosses match in form those on the Kōfuku-ji bell of 727, a quiet thread linking the two across four generations of bell-founders.

What to Look For

Stand in front of the bell and the first thing to register is its proportion. It is unusually tall and narrow for its mouth, and below the shoulder the wall drops in an almost straight line rather than swelling outward. The total height reaches about 115 centimetres against a mouth only 55 centimetres across. The effect is austere, closer to a tall jar than to the rounded bells of later centuries.

The details reward a slow look. The dragon-head loop at the top, used to hang the bell, is plainly worked. The crown is left without the usual ring lines, raised only slightly at its centre. The broad bands that circle the body are smooth and undecorated. Where the wooden beam would strike, a simple eight-petal lotus boss is set, placed low on the body in a manner that points to the bell's early date.

The inscription that gives the bell its fame is cast on the inside, so visitors cannot see it directly. The museum has produced a precise replica that brings the reversed characters into view, letting you study the disciplined, refined hand of a ninth-century writer without peering into the dark interior of the original.

Around the Museum

The Sagawa Art Museum is worth time in its own right. Opened in 1998 for the fortieth anniversary of the Sagawa Express delivery company, its low gabled halls sit within a wide water garden and seem to float on the surface. The permanent galleries centre on the painter Hirayama Ikuo, the sculptor Satō Chūryō and the Raku tea-ware potter Raku Jikinyū, with the bell shown on its own occasions.

One practical note: the museum closed at the end of September 2025 for around nine months of renovation and is scheduled to reopen in July 2026, so check its current status before planning a visit. When it does reopen, the wider region rewards a longer stay. Mt. Hiei and Enryaku-ji, the World Heritage monastery where this bell began, rise on the far side of the lake and can be reached by cable car. Closer to the southern tip of Lake Biwa, the temple Mii-dera keeps its own celebrated bell, the Evening Bell whose tone was counted among the eight classic views of Ōmi, along with a second bell tied by legend to the warrior monk Benkei.