Henkaisan Fukyoraian Main Hall (Watanabe Ieji Buddhist Hall)

A Merchant Family's Private Buddha Hall

The Main Hall of Henkaisan Fukyorai-an (遍界山不去来庵本堂, also written Fukyoraian), the private Buddha hall of the Watanabe family (渡邉家持仏堂), stands in Ryōgaechō 1-chōme, Aoi Ward, Shizuoka City, was completed in 1915, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 December 2000.

Ryōgaechō means Money-Changers' Town. Tokugawa Ieyasu established a silver mint at Sunpu in 1606, and the exchange houses that grew up around it gave the district its name. The mint later moved to Edo, where the same function produced the place name Ginza. Sunpu kept the older name and lost the silver.

The Watanabe family arrived from Izu in the middle of the Edo period and traded here under the shop name Izuya, each head of the house taking the name Izuya Denpachi. They dealt in kimono fabric and in money exchange, and were known locally as Iden. The fifth and sixth heads, Rinpachi and Naomichi, were devout enough to receive posthumous Buddhist names from the priest Fukuda Gyōkai, and through that connection the family was given a seated Amida Nyorai that had been the personal devotional image of Emperor Kōkaku, later passed to Gyōkai himself.

The hall exists to house that statue. It was not built as a temple for a congregation. It was built as a place for one family to put one Buddha.

What Survives Inside

Construction ran across three generations, from 1897 to 1915 by the family's own account. The building is dozō-zukuri, a plastered earthen-walled storehouse construction, single-storeyed, roofed in tile, with a floor area of 63 square metres. Local master carpenters Nakamura Tsunekichi and Kosugi Seizō led the work. Keyaki and other high-grade timbers were used without stinting.

The doors on the front face carry a pair of Niō, the muscular guardian kings usually found flanking a temple gate as carved wood or clay. Here they are executed in kote-e, relief modelled in plaster with a trowel by a plasterer rather than a sculptor. The plasterer was Morita Kakudō, the outstanding practitioner of the craft in Shizuoka. Painted ceiling work runs above.

A survey in 2002 turned up something that reads like a story and is not one. The ridge-end tile above the front canopy is of shishiguchi type, its top formed as three rolled sutra scrolls. The construction drawings had specified that actual sutra scrolls be placed inside them. They were there.

Documentation of that quality is rare for a building of this kind. Fukuda Junyū, a senior disciple of Gyōkai, acted as overall supervisor, and his handwritten construction instructions, sketches and correspondence survive nearly complete. Most private halls of the Meiji and Taishō periods left nothing.

Then there is what did not happen to it. Central Shizuoka burned in a major fire in 1940 and burned again under Allied bombing in 1945. Very little of the old town centre came through both. This hall stands where it was built, with its original fabric, in a district otherwise rebuilt from nothing.

Visiting, and the Limits of It

Fukyorai-an is not a public temple and does not receive visitors. There are no opening hours, no admission fee, and no arrangement for viewing the interior. The Izuya Denpachi Cultural Foundation, which the family established, holds segaki-e memorial services here in spring and autumn, and relatives gather monthly for observances. These are family religious occasions, not open events.

The site is about twelve minutes on foot from Shin-Shizuoka Station and a similar distance from JR Shizuoka Station, in the middle of the city's main entertainment and shopping district. Ryōgaechō 1-chōme today is bars, offices and covered arcades. The hall sits behind a wall in the middle of it, which is the fact worth registering before anything else about the place.

Anyone who wants to see plaster relief of this order at close range has better options. Morita Kakudō's work appears elsewhere in Shizuoka Prefecture, and kote-e survives in quantity in Matsuzaki on the Izu Peninsula, where the Chōhachi Art Museum is devoted to the plasterer Irie Chōhachi and the technique is treated as the town's principal draw. Matsuzaki is also where the Watanabe family originally came from, which closes a circle that is probably coincidence.

For context on the district itself, Sunpu Castle Park lies about ten minutes north on foot, and the reconstructed Tatsumi Yagura and Higashi Gomon there explain the castle town that Ryōgaechō was built to serve. Shizuoka Sengen Shrine is a further fifteen minutes beyond. Both are open, and both help make sense of why a money-changing family in this particular street ended up with an emperor's Amida.

Photography of the exterior from the public road is possible where the building is visible over the boundary. Interior photography does not arise.