The Priests' Quarters of Gokokuin Temple, Kan'eiji Temple

A Famous Architect's Quiet Japanese Turn

The architect Okada Shin'ichiro is remembered for buildings that announce themselves: the Kabukiza theater, the stately Meiji Seimeikan office block that would later be named an Important Cultural Property, the prize-winning design for Osaka's great public hall. So it comes as a surprise to find his name attached to something as understated as the priests' quarters of Gokokuin, a low tiled residence standing beside the temple's main hall in Ueno.

Built in 1927, the ground floor of this kuri is one of the few purely Japanese-style works Okada is known to have designed. He was then a professor at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, the forerunner of today's Tokyo University of the Arts, whose campus sits just across the way. The building rewards a second look precisely because its maker usually worked in a very different key.

Gokokuin, the Temple's First Offspring

Gokokuin holds a particular place in the history of Kan'eiji. When the priest Tenkai founded the great temple in 1625, this was the very first sub-temple established beneath it, set up by his disciple Shojun. Its Buddha hall, the Shakado, once ranked as the largest structure on the Ueno hill and served as the head hall until the Konpon Chudo was completed. The temple was pushed from one site to another as the mausolea of the fourth and fifth shoguns were built, settling at its present spot in 1709.

Today Gokokuin is best known for its Daikokuten, the deity of fortune donated in image form by the third shogun, Iemitsu, and counted among the Seven Lucky Gods of the Yanaka pilgrimage. Pilgrims still walk the circuit in the first ten days of the new year.

The upheaval that brought Okada into the story came in 1927, when the temple handed over most of its grounds for the founding of a municipal middle school, now Ueno High School, and moved its main hall to where it stands now. The new kuri was raised alongside it.

How the Quarters Are Laid Out

The kuri stands to the west of the Shakado and divides into a guest-hall wing and a living wing. The guest section is built around a courtyard roughly seven bays by two. Along its north side run the entrance, a reception room, and rooms for the working clergy. On the south side, a guest room of twelve and a half mats sits beside two ten-mat rooms placed east and west, with a veranda corridor wrapping the whole. The plan is practical, each space set where its use requires, and it carries the flavor of early-Showa domestic building clearly.

Listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2001, the quarters are valued both for that architectural clarity and as an unusual example of a leading modern architect working entirely in the traditional idiom. The registration covers the single-story portion completed in 1927.