Jorokuji Temple Sanmon

Jōroku-ji Sanmon: Tokushima's Oldest Surviving Building

At the entrance to a Sōtō Zen temple in the Jōroku district of southern Tokushima City stands a two-storied wooden gate that predates every other building in the prefecture. The Sanmon of Jōroku-ji is a nijūmon, a gate three bays wide with three passageways across its front and a separate roof over each of its two levels. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the late Muromachi period, between 1467 and 1572. No document records the exact year it was raised.

The gate faces east, toward the approach that leads in from the nearby Katsuura River. Its upper and lower roofs are both irimoya (hip-and-gable) form, covered in hongawara tiling, the formal method that lays broad concave pan tiles between rows of rounded cover tiles. Visitors reach it only after passing through two earlier gates, so the Sanmon already marks the threshold of the temple's inner precinct rather than its outer edge.

Why It Was Designated

Jōroku-ji Sanmon was designated an Important Cultural Property on 31 March 1953, counted as a single structure. A wooden ridge plaque (munafuda) is registered as an attached item under the same designation. In 1957 the gate was taken apart and reassembled in a full dismantling repair, the standard conservation method for timber architecture in Japan, which allows decayed members to be replaced while keeping the original design.

The case for its importance rests on age and rarity. As the oldest dated building in Tokushima, it is the prefecture's primary surviving example of medieval temple carpentry. Two-storied gates of this scale that have come down from the 15th or 16th century are uncommon across Shikoku, and the survival of one attached to a provincial Zen temple is what gives the structure its weight. The temple itself was rebuilt as a Sōtō Zen institution in the late 1480s by Hosokawa Masayuki, the military governor of Awa, Mikawa, and Sanuki provinces, and the gate belongs to that period of patronage.

What to Look For

The reward of the Sanmon is in looking up. Stand beneath the central passage and the underside of the upper story opens above you: the bracket complexes that carry the eaves, the exposed rafters, and the heavy beams spanning the bays. A nijūmon differs from the more common single-roofed gate because the lower roof is a true roof rather than a skirt, which gives the building its layered, vertical presence.

The walk to the gate is part of the experience. From the road you pass first through the Sōmon, a kōrai-mon set as the outer gate, then the Chūmon, before the Sanmon comes into view at the end of the avenue. Maples line this approach. In late autumn the path turns red, and the gate is at its most photographed against the colour.

Look at the tile work as well. The deep eaves and the weathered grey of the hongawara roof read differently in morning and afternoon light, and the east-facing front catches the early sun.

The Rest of the Temple and the Area

Jōroku-ji is sometimes called the "Hōryū-ji of Awa" for the concentration of designated buildings inside one compound. Beyond the gate, the precinct is laid out around a central courtyard. The Main Hall facing the Sanmon was rebuilt in 1629 by Hachisuka Iemasa, lord of the Tokushima domain, originally as the hōjō (abbot's quarters); it took on its role as the main hall later. The Kannon Hall and the Sutra Repository, both Important Cultural Properties, stand to the left of the court.

The temple's name comes from its principal image, a seated Shō-Kannon of jōroku scale carved in the late Heian period in the smooth Jōchō style, standing about 3.1 metres. It can be viewed through an opening in the Kannon Hall.

One feature has a darker history. In 1581 the warlord Chōsokabe Motochika, campaigning to unify Shikoku, invited the local castellan Shingai Dōzen to a banquet here under a pretext of peace and had him and his retainers killed. The blood-marked veranda boards were later reused as ceiling planks in the corridor before Tokuun-in, and the temple is known for this "blood ceiling." The garden is generally not open to the public.

The temple sits on the east bank of the Katsuura River, in the southern reaches of Tokushima City near the border with Komatsushima. From central Tokushima, the lively streets around the Awa Odori Kaikan and the Bizan Ropeway are roughly seven kilometres away, making the temple an easy half-day addition to a city visit.