Saikyoji Temple Scripture House

Saikyoji Sutra Repository: A 1930 Storehouse Built Like an Edo Treasury

Forty-seven square metres. That is the entire footprint of the Saikyoji sutra repository, roughly the size of a modest two-bedroom apartment. Onto that footprint the builders loaded a hipped-and-gabled tile roof, a dormer gable at the front, a projecting porch with an undulating cusped gable of its own, and a set of bracket blocks that would not look out of place on a building five times larger.

The result stands south of the main hall, facing east, and it is the reason people who care about carpentry come here twice.

The date is Showa 5, or 1930. That is the surprising part. Nothing in the building's vocabulary belongs to the twentieth century.

Why a Sutra Hall Is Built Like a Vault

A kyozo holds scripture. In a temple that owned a full Buddhist canon, that could mean thousands of fascicles of paper and silk, the single most vulnerable category of property a temple possessed and the hardest to replace. Fire was the enemy, and Japanese builders had a well-developed answer to it.

That answer was dozo construction: a timber frame packed and coated with successive layers of earth and finished in lime plaster, producing walls thick enough to hold out a neighbourhood fire for hours. Merchants in Edo and Osaka used it for their goods. Temples used it for their books. At Saikyoji the walls rise from a base of cut stone blocks and are finished in white plaster, the standard combination, and one that reads as intentionally plain against the elaboration happening at roof level.

Sutra repositories are not common in Tokushima Prefecture. Mima City's own heritage notes describe this one as unusual within the prefecture, which is part of why the building was assessed on its own rather than folded into a single entry with the hall and gate.

Three Roofs on One Small Building

Work upward and count.

The main roof is irimoya, hipped along the lower slopes and gabled at the apex, laid in hongawara tile. Set into the front slope is a chidori-hafu, a triangular dormer gable that sits on the roof surface rather than terminating a ridge. Its name comes from the plover, whose flight the shape was thought to resemble. In front of that, a small anteroom projects from the facade under a karahafu, the sinuous double-curved gable with a peak at its centre, a form associated with formality and with entrances of consequence.

Three gable forms, stacked and overlapped across a building measuring 7.1 metres by 5.3 metres. It should be too much. It is not, because each one sits at a different scale and a different depth, so the eye reads them as receding layers rather than as competing shapes.

Under the karahafu, the anteroom front is carried on square posts, unusual in itself where round posts might be expected. Above each post sits a mitsudo bracket set with a sarato, a shallow dish-shaped block inserted beneath the main bearing block. The curved koryo beam spanning between them carries carved eyo, decorative scrollwork worked into the timber's surface, and the struts above are dressed with oigata, wing-shaped carved boards flanking a central post.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry calls this combination distinctive, and the word is doing real work. These are all standard components of Edo-period temple carpentry. Their proportions and their assembly here are not standard. Someone in 1930 was working from a tradition he knew intimately and was not merely copying it.

Seeing It in Context

The repository sits within a precinct whose three registered buildings span 87 years: the gate of 1843, the main hall of 1858, the repository of 1930. Walking between them is a compressed lesson in how a provincial temple grew, and in how long a body of craft knowledge can stay alive in one valley.

All three were entered in the register on 23 October 2008, with notice on 10 November. The repository holds number 36-0071 and qualified under the criterion for contribution to the historic character of the landscape.

Raked gravel gardens lie in front of the buildings, and a pond garden, now dry, occupies the ground behind the main hall. The wider setting is the Teramachi of Mima-cho, a cluster of temples that also includes Anrakuji, Ganshoji, Rinshoji and Jonenji, grouped around the Kozato Temple Site, a National Historic Site preserving the remains of a Hakuho-period foundation of around thirteen centuries ago.

Saikyoji is a working parish temple of the Honganji-ha branch of Jodo Shinshu, founded in 1609 when Chiba Masamune, tenth head priest of Anrakuji, retired here with his third son. The precinct can be entered and the repository exterior seen without charge. What is stored inside is another matter, and one for the temple to decide.