Kiyomizu-Dera Temple Priests' Quarters

The Working Building of a Shizuoka Temple

Kiyomizudera Kuri (清水寺庫裏, also written Kiyomizu-dera Kuri), the priests' quarters of Otowasan Kiyomizudera in Aoi Ward, Shizuoka City, is a timber building of 1931 that was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 20 November 2001. A kuri is the part of a Japanese temple where the resident priest and his family live and where the kitchen, office and reception rooms are found. It is the least ceremonial building in a precinct and often the busiest.

This one stands southeast of the reinforced concrete main hall and covers 249 square metres. Most of it is single storey, with a two-storey section at the rear, and the whole is roofed in tile.

The architect was Koda Minoru (古宇田実), the same man who drew the plans for the concrete main hall completed in the same year. The pairing is worth pausing over. In 1931 Koda handed this temple a hall of poured concrete and, a few steps away, a residence built entirely of wood in the manner of a good country house. The Agency for Cultural Affairs classes the kuri as kindai wafu kenchiku, modern architecture in the Japanese manner, a category covering buildings that keep traditional carpentry while accommodating twentieth-century patterns of living.

How the Building Is Arranged

The registration file describes two joined parts. The kuri proper is single storey, entered through a genkan porch with an irimoya roof, and the main block is also irimoya, set tsumairi so that the entrance faces the gable end rather than the long eaves side. Behind it rises the okushoin, a two-storey timber section under a yosemune hipped roof.

Along the north side of the kuri, running from west to east, come three rooms in sequence: a reception room of roughly eight mats, then a second eight-mat room, then a ten-mat omote-shoin, the formal front parlour where guests of standing were received. Anyone who has visited a working temple will recognise the logic. Visitors move along a single line, and the rooms grow in size and formality as they go.

Registration number 22-0077 was assigned in the thirty-first round of registrations, with public notice on 4 December 2001. As with the main hall, the criterion cited is that the building serves as a model of design. Registered status is deliberately light-touch: it protects a building while leaving it in use, which matters for a kuri, since the family living inside it cannot simply move out.

Visiting, and What You Can Actually See

The kuri is where the temple office operates, and it is the point of contact for most visitors. Kiyomizudera is the nineteenth stop on the Suruga thirty-three Kannon pilgrimage, and pilgrims collecting goshuin, the inked and stamped seals that record a visit, present their books here. The temple asks that you telephone ahead on 054-246-9333, because the resident priest is not always on site and an unannounced arrival may find nobody to write the seal.

The interior is a private residence and is not open for general viewing. What you can appreciate from the precinct is the exterior: the tiled roofs stepping down from the two-storey rear block to the single-storey front, the gable end presented to the approach, and the plain, well-proportioned genkan. Photography of the exterior is unrestricted in practice, but the windows belong to a family home and deserve the same discretion you would show anywhere else.

Otowacho Station on the Shizuoka Railway line is a two-minute walk away, which makes this one of the easier registered buildings in the prefecture to reach. Only two parking spaces exist. The temple's calendar brings the precinct to life four times a year in particular: the New Year rite on 1 January, Setsubun on 3 February, the great Kannon festival on 9 July with its fireworks, and the striking of the bell on New Year's Eve. On those days the office side of the temple is at its busiest, and the kuri is worth seeing simply as a building doing its job.

While you are here, the 1919 bell tower stands nearby and is registered in its own right, and the Kannon-do, designated by Shizuoka Prefecture, holds a thousand-armed Kannon said to have been the personal devotional image of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The temple was granted the use of the Tokugawa triple-hollyhock crest, which you will spot around the precinct once you start looking.