Saikyoji Temple Main Hall

Saikyoji Main Hall: An 1858 Worship Space in the Temple Quarter of Mima

The measurements in the national register are worth pausing over. Saikyoji's main hall runs 14 metres across its front and 16 metres front to back. It is deeper than it is wide, and that single proportion tells you which school of Buddhism built it.

Halls of the Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) school are planned around a congregation rather than around a static image. The inner sanctuary holding the Amida Buddha occupies a modest strip at the rear, while the outer chamber where worshippers gather swells to fill the rest of the floor. Stretch that outer chamber and the building grows backwards. Saikyoji follows the pattern faithfully, then departs from it in one respect that the Agency for Cultural Affairs singled out: the wide veranda along the front is handled as part of the outer chamber rather than as a separate threshold, so the worship floor effectively spills out to the eaves line.

The hall dates from Ansei 5, or 1858, ten years before the Tokugawa order collapsed. It occupies the western side of the precinct and faces east, toward the morning light and toward the row of temples that gives this corner of Mima its name.

Why It Entered the National Register

Saikyoji Main Hall was entered in the Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 October 2008, with public notice following on 10 November. Its register number is 36-0070.

Registration is not the same thing as designation, and the distinction matters when you read Japanese heritage signage. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated: the state selects them, controls what may be altered, and shoulders much of the cost. The registration system, introduced by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, was built for a different problem. Japan was losing enormous numbers of ordinary good buildings from the Meiji, Taisho and late Edo periods, structures too numerous and too privately owned for the designation machinery to absorb. Registration applies a lighter touch. Owners notify the authorities before major exterior changes, receive tax relief and technical advice, and otherwise carry on using the building.

Candidates are assessed against three criteria. Saikyoji's main hall qualified under the first and most demanding of them, that the building is a model of its type of design. The temple's gate and sutra repository, registered on the same day, qualified under a different criterion, that they contribute to the historic character of the landscape. Reading the three entries side by side shows how deliberately the assessors distinguished between them.

What earned the hall that first criterion is craftsmanship rather than scale. The gable ends carry decoration built from stacked mitsudo-gumi, three-block bracket sets piled one above another instead of used singly, a treatment that turns a structural element into a display of joinery. At the rear, a sugaru-hafu, a small subordinate gable that leans against the main roof, covers the projecting service space. The roof itself is irimoya, hipped at the lower slopes and gabled at the top, laid in hongawara tiles, the formal combination of broad flat pantiles and semicylindrical cover tiles.

What to Look At

Stand at the foot of the one-bay canopy porch on the east front and look up into the beam ends. A dragon and a tiger have been carved there, coiled into the timber of the koryo and the supporting members. The pairing is old in East Asian art: the dragon governs water and the eastern sky, the tiger wind and the western mountains, and together they hold the cosmos in balance. Provincial temple carpenters of the late Edo period loved the subject, and the version here has the thick, muscular cutting typical of Awa Province work rather than the thinner, more linear carving found around Kyoto.

Step back twenty paces and the roof reads differently. From directly in front, the irimoya profile looks conventional. From the side, the depth of the building becomes obvious, and you can see how much roof the carpenters had to carry across a 16-metre span without an intermediate wall to help them.

The gardens repay a slow walk. Raked gravel is kept in front of the buildings, and behind the main hall lies an older pond garden, now dry, whose central pine is understood to predate the surrounding stonework by a considerable margin. A karesansui dry garden between the hall and the reception rooms was laid out in the Showa and Heisei eras, which makes it modern by the standards of everything else here, though the borrowed view of Mount Santo beyond the wall is as old as the hill.

Saikyoji is an active parish temple, not a museum, and its rear buildings, including the priest's quarters and the parishioners' hall, were rebuilt in March 1985. The registered structures are the three older ones. Visitors are welcome in the precinct; anything beyond it depends on asking first, and on the day.

The Temple That Was Built for a Retirement

Saikyoji was founded in Keicho 14, or 1609, in the first decade of Tokugawa rule. Chiba Masamune, tenth head priest of the neighbouring Anrakuji, stepped down from his post and moved here with his third son Ryoshu. Locals called the result the inkyodera, the retirement temple, a nickname that survives in guidebooks four centuries later.

The arrangement was less modest than it sounds. Under the Awa domain, Saikyoji held the same ceremonial rank as Anrakuji for purposes such as audiences with the daimyo, and it eventually administered ten branch temples across what are now Mima and Miyoshi cities and parts of Kagawa Prefecture. Its full formal name, Shishinzan Chibain Saikyoji, keeps the founding family in the middle of the title. It belongs to the Honganji-ha branch of Jodo Shinshu.

Nothing of the 1609 building survives above ground. The hall you see replaced earlier structures in 1858, by which time the temple had two and a half centuries of parish support behind it, which is the plain explanation for why a village temple could afford carving of this quality.