Tofukuji Temple Main Hall

A Temple Hall That Doubles as a House

Tofukuji Main Hall (東福寺本堂, also written Tōfuku-ji Hondō) is a Shingon Buddhist worship hall in the Kiya district of Sadamitsu, Tsurugi Town, Mima County, Tokushima Prefecture, rebuilt in 1833 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 February 2012.

A note before anything else, because the name causes confusion. This is not the celebrated Zen monastery of the same characters in Kyoto. The Tokushima Tofukuji belongs to the Omuro branch of Shingon Buddhism and answers to Ninna-ji in Kyoto, and it sits well up the Sadamitsu valley on the northern flank of the Tsurugi mountains, about twelve minutes by car from Sadamitsu Station on the JR Tokushima Line.

The hall faces east across the middle of the precinct. It measures 26.2 metres along its ridge and 13.1 metres from front to back, with a registered floor area of 374 square metres, which makes it large for a rural parish temple. The roof is hipped on all four sides and laid with formal round-and-flat tiles, the type reserved for buildings of some standing. A pent roof, the geya, runs the whole way around the base like a low apron, and the entrance at the centre of the east front carries a copper-sheathed karahafu, the undulating cusped gable that Japanese carpenters used to mark a formal doorway.

What sets the building apart is what happens behind that facade. A wide veranda, the hiroen, runs the length of the east face, and behind it the plan opens into eight rooms arranged in a grid. The inner sanctuary, the naijin, occupies just one of those eight: the second bay from the south in the rear row. The northern portion of the building was originally the kuri, the priests' living quarters and kitchen. Worship hall and residence share a single roof, and the result reads more like an oversized manor house than a temple.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting old buildings. Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures sit at the top, with tight controls and heavy state involvement. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, a category created in 1996, work differently: owners simply notify the authorities before making significant alterations, and in exchange they get technical guidance, tax relief and eligibility for repair subsidies. The system was designed for the enormous stock of buildings roughly fifty years old and upward that would otherwise disappear unremarked. Tofukuji Main Hall came in under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country, in the seventy-second round of registrations.

The assessors singled out the hall's dignified exterior, and standing in front of it you can see why. Hipped roofs of this span want a lot of timber and a lot of tile, and the effect is weight rather than delicacy. Yet the composition avoids monotony, because the pent roof breaks the wall plane at a low level and the copper gable over the porch introduces a curve into a design otherwise built entirely from straight lines.

The temple's own account holds that the hall was modelled on Tōdai-ji in Nara and originally conceived with a mokoshi, the skirt roof that wraps the base of a great Buddhist hall. Because the priests' quarters were attached, that skirt ended up functioning as an ordinary pent roof over a single-storey building. The claim comes from the temple rather than from the Agency for Cultural Affairs record, so treat it as tradition rather than documented fact, but it does explain a proportion that otherwise looks eccentric.

The Agency's file also records repair work in 1965. The temple's own chronology adds a re-roofing in 2004, carried out as part of the four hundred and seventh anniversary of the temple's revival, alongside the construction of a new bell tower and priests' quarters.

The Precinct, and What Grew Around It

Tofukuji traces itself back further than its buildings do. Temple tradition places its founding in 724, when the Imbe chief ritualist Tamabuchi no Sukune is said to have built Hōfuku-ji as a votive foundation attached to Imbe Shrine, later renaming one of its subsidiary halls Tofukuji. A second tradition credits Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, with carving the temple's Fudō Myōō image and establishing the temple in 812 during his travels. Both accounts are handed down by the temple and neither can be verified from contemporary documents.

The verifiable history is harder edged. Chōsokabe Motochika's forces burned the temple in 1582 during the wars that brought most of Shikoku under his control. The monk Hōkō revived it in 1597, giving it the sub-temple name Hōkō-in that it still carries. Fire took it again in the first month of 1805. The community moved the temple from Kira to its present site the following year, and the hall standing today went up in 1833.

Come through the gate and the first thing you meet is not the hall but the sanmon, a two-storey gate of 1896 designated by the town. The carpenter was Kiriage Yūkichi and the carving was done by Miyake Sekishūsai IX from Haibara in Wakimachi. It is a three-bay, one-door gate roughly 6.5 metres wide and 4.5 metres deep, mixing Japanese and Chinese detailing, and the guardian figures set into it are worth a slow look before you walk on.

In front of the hall lies a dry landscape garden whose ground plan traces the Sanskrit seed syllable kān, the written sign of Fudō Myōō, the temple's principal image. Inside the garden sit a stone lantern dated 1690, a Kamakura-period stone pagoda that once had thirteen tiers and has lost four from its middle, and a silver fragrant olive registered as a town natural monument. Behind the hall is a second garden with a waterfall and pond. A satsuki azalea said to be more than three centuries old stands three metres tall and spreads five across.

The temple also keeps an art museum on the grounds, open from 9:00 to 17:00 with no admission charge and closed through December. Parking is free, with thirty spaces across two lots; the first is directly in front of the gate. Photography of the exterior and the gardens is not restricted, though anyone wanting to photograph inside the hall should ask at the temple office first.

One last thread worth pulling. Tofukuji is the twenty-ninth station of the Hatayama Shikoku circuit, a miniature pilgrimage of eighty-eight sites laid out around the Hatayama district of Tsurugi Town in imitation of the great Shikoku pilgrimage. Seven of the small halls on that circuit belong to Tofukuji and were themselves registered as Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 May 2017. They are modest three-bay structures, some open on three sides, built between the mid-Edo period and the 1920s. Visiting them turns a temple stop into an afternoon in the hills.