Shinkoin Temple Main Hall

A Temple Hall in the Tower's Shadow

Tokyo Tower draws the eye first, all red steel and height. Walk to its western foot in Higashi-Azabu, though, and you arrive at something the tower can only borrow: deep time. The main hall of Shinkoin is a low wooden building, completed in 1955, that belongs to a Pure Land Buddhist temple whose roots reach back more than six centuries. Japan's national government added it to the register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2017.

It is not a large building. Under a hip-and-gable roof tiled with sangawara pantiles, the hall covers about 107 square meters, a single story of cypress and plaster. What gives it weight is the company it keeps, both the temple's own past and the steel giant rising directly behind it.

From a Study Cloister to a Shogun's Memorial

Shinkoin began as a learning hall. When the priest Yuyo Shoso founded the great temple of Zojo-ji in 1393, at a place then called Kaizuka near modern Kojimachi, he set up study quarters within its grounds. Those quarters grew into Shinkoin. The fortunes of the small temple followed those of its parent. When Zojo-ji became the Tokugawa family temple and moved to Shiba in 1598, Shinkoin moved too.

In 1695 the temple took on a particular charge. It was made a branch hall of Zojo-ji and a center for continuous nenbutsu chanting, dedicated to the memory of the second Tokugawa shogun, Hidetada. Later, in 1761, the building of a shogunal mausoleum nearby pushed the temple to a site close to Akabanebashi. War undid much of this. The air raids of 1945 burned the temple halls, though the head of the principal image and the front gate came through the fire.

Then the city itself rearranged the ground. A postwar land readjustment in 1950 moved Shinkoin to its present plot in Higashi-Azabu, and the surviving Edo-period gate was carried over and re-erected. The main hall that stands today was finished five years later, in 1955.

Why a 1955 Building Earns Protection

Japan keeps two separate systems for built heritage. Older, rarer structures are "designated" as Important Cultural Properties or National Treasures. A second, lighter category, the Registered Tangible Cultural Property, was created in 1996 to protect buildings, often more recent ones, that shape the look and feel of a place. Shinkoin's hall falls into this second group. The criterion recorded for it reads, in plain terms, that the building contributes to the historical landscape of the country.

The craftsmanship explains the choice. The columns are Japanese cypress, hinoki, and the carpenters reserved round columns for the two most sacred zones, the inner sanctuary and the area behind the Buddhist altar platform, while squaring the rest. Curved koryo tie-beams and frog-leg struts called kaerumata carry the vocabulary of temple architecture. Yet the hall does not pretend to be older than it is. Openwork transoms of a kind found in fine houses, and a lattice glass window set into the west wall, mark it honestly as a building of the mid-twentieth century. It is a temple hall that speaks two architectural languages at once and lets both be heard.

What to Look For

Approach from the slope off Sakurada-dori and the first thing you notice is color. The temple's vermilion gate stands against the red lattice of Tokyo Tower behind it, a meeting of an eighteenth-century carpenter's red and a 1958 engineer's red. Photographers come for exactly this frame, the old gate and the tower stacked in a single shot. The pairing is the very thing the registration honors: a historical building holding its ground inside a thoroughly modern skyline.

Step into the compact stone garden before the hall and the noise of the district drops away. Inside, when the doors are open, a gilded Amida Buddha sits in the dim, lit from behind so the figure seems to float, a quietly theatrical effect that the modern glasswork makes possible. Take a moment at the eaves to read the carpentry: the cusped katomado windows, the carved struts, the plain cypress that has aged to honey.

The grounds hold smaller surprises. A little hall enshrines Otake Dainichi, drawn from the story of Otake, an Edo-period servant remembered for feeding the poor from her own portion and living on the grains caught in the kitchen drain. Her humble piety so moved Keishoin, mother of the fifth shogun, that gifts were sent in her honor. For a temple this size, the density of stories is part of the pleasure.

Getting There and Nearby

The hall sits a short walk from Akabanebashi Station on the Toei Oedo Line, roughly five minutes on foot. Kamiyacho Station on the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line and Onarimon and Shibakoen stations on the Toei Mita Line are each about ten minutes away. The temple shares its corner with Rurikoji, a neighboring temple whose sleek modern hall makes a pointed contrast with Shinkoin's timber. Tokyo Tower itself, with its observation decks and aquarium-side bustle, is quite literally next door, and the grand head temple of Zojo-ji, from which Shinkoin sprang, is a pleasant walk further toward Shiba Park.