Daijuji Temple Bell Tower

A Bell Tower Built to Mark a Bell's Return

Daijuji Bell Tower (大樹寺鐘楼, also written Daiju-ji Shōrō) is the belfry of a Soto Zen temple in Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Tottori Prefecture, erected in 1954 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on August 15, 2024. It stands southwest of the main hall on a raised masonry platform, faces east, and occupies a footprint of just 9.9 square meters beneath a copper-sheathed hip-and-gable roof.

The reason for the 1954 date is recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs entry, and it is the most interesting thing about the building. Daijuji's temple bell was surrendered during the war under the metal requisition program that stripped bronze from Buddhist temples across Japan. The bell now hanging here is a recasting, and the tower was put up to mark it.

Tens of thousands of Japanese temple bells went into the furnaces in those years. Many parishes replaced theirs quietly in the decades that followed, without ceremony. Daijuji built a structure for the occasion. That decision, made in a rural Tottori parish less than a decade after the surrender, tells you how the loss had been felt.

Small Building, Full Vocabulary

Nine and a half square meters is roughly three meters on a side. Into that footprint the carpenter fitted almost the complete grammar of Zen-style temple carpentry, and the density of detail is what the registration recognizes. The Agency for Cultural Affairs classifies it not as a building but under the category of other structures, a technical distinction that says something about scale while saying nothing about craft.

Start at the base. The round pillars rest on soban, disc-shaped plinths set on the foundation stones, a feature borrowed from the Zen architectural idiom imported from Song China. The pillars themselves are set with uchikorobi, an inward lean of a degree or two. It is invisible unless you look for it and it makes the whole frame read as stable rather than merely upright.

Across the front, at roughly waist height, runs a koshinuki tie beam whose upper edge curves upward toward the center. This is a shaped member, not a straight one, and it is the single gesture that lifts the tower out of the ordinary. Above the pillars sit mitsudo bracket complexes, the three-block arrangement, and between them are kaerumata, the frog-leg struts named for their splayed silhouette. The eaves are futanoki shigedaruki: two tiers of rafters, closely spaced, which is the expensive way to build an eave.

Step under it and look up. The interior ceiling is a coffered gōtenjō. For a structure this small, in a country parish, that is a considerable finish.

Copper roofing sets the tower apart from its neighbors. The main hall of 1920, the Founder's Hall of 1951, and the Monks' Hall of 1955 all wear clay pantiles; the bell tower alone is sheathed in copper, which has weathered to the dull green that now reads against the grey of the tile behind it. All four buildings were registered together on August 15, 2024, this one as No. 31-0295.

Seeing It

The bell tower is the easiest of the four registered buildings to appreciate, because none of it is behind a door. It sits in the open on its platform southwest of the main hall, and the grounds at Daijuji can be walked freely. Bracket work that would be forty centimeters above your reach in a large temple gate is, here, close enough to examine properly.

Whether a visitor may strike the bell is a matter for the temple; ask rather than assume. The same goes for photography in and around the halls. The temple's number is 0858-74-0854.

Daijuji is at 408 Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Yazu District, Tottori Prefecture 680-0307, with free parking. Allow about 20 minutes by car from JR Higashi-Kōge Station or roughly 30 minutes from the Kawahara interchange on the Tottori Expressway; a Yazu bus toward Ochiiwa also serves the route from Higashi-Kōge. Coming up the stone steps you pass the temple's uraku-tsubaki camellia, a town-designated cultural property standing 8.7 meters tall with a crown 10.5 meters across, in flower from late November into early April. Snow reaches this valley most winters, and the combination of a green copper roof, white ground, and pink blossom is the reason to come in February rather than October.