Daijuji Temple Main Hall

A Taisho Main Hall on a Tottori Hillside

Daijuji Main Hall (大樹寺本堂, also written Daiju-ji Hondō) is the principal hall of a Soto Zen temple in Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Tottori Prefecture, completed in 1920 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on August 15, 2024. It stands at the center of the compound on a hillside east of the Ichiba Castle site, facing west down the valley, and covers a floor area of 256 square meters under a tiled hip-and-gable roof.

Visitors sometimes confuse this temple with the far better known Daijuji in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, the ancestral temple of the Tokugawa family. The two share a name and nothing else. The Tottori Daijuji, whose full title is Fumonzan Daijuji, is a modest country temple reached by a flight of stone steps, and its architectural interest lies in a group of twentieth-century buildings rather than in medieval survivals.

The temple's own records burned, so nobody can say when it was founded. What survives is an outline. The original hall stood on high ground in the neighboring settlement of Ichiba and served as the mortuary temple of Ando Yoshimitsu, a warrior whose exact rank the sources disagree on: the temple's account calls him a senior retainer, while Tottori City's tourism office describes him as lord of Tsuguro Castle under the Mori. Fire during the Tensho era (1573–92) destroyed the buildings, most likely during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign against Tottori Castle in 1580. A young monk named Ryozan Sokaku is said to have carried the Shakyamuni image out through the flames.

Rebuilding came in the Meireki era (1655–58) on the present site, at which point the temple became Soto Zen and a branch of Jodenji in Shikano. Another fire in the Horeki era (1751–64) took it down again; the eighth abbot, Shinryu, brought it back. The hall a visitor sees today, then, is at least the third or fourth generation, and it dates from 1920.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration No. 31-0292 was granted in the 107th round of listings under the criterion that the building contributes to the historic character of the national landscape. That criterion sounds bureaucratic, but in this case it is descriptive: the tall ridgeline of the main hall reads from some distance across the fields below, and the roofline is what fixes the temple in its setting.

The construction is timber, single story, with a pantile roof in the irimoya hirairi configuration, meaning the entrance sits on the long eaves side rather than under the gable. Scale is the first thing that registers. A country temple of this size, with a ridge this high, was an expensive undertaking for a rural parish in the years after the First World War, and the carpentry reflects that ambition.

The front porch, or kōhai, repays close attention. Its rafters are curved rather than straight, a deliberate piece of shaping that softens the whole projection. The nakazonae, the struts set between the bracket complexes, and the tabasami, the carved plates that flank the porch beams, both carry dense relief work. This is the part of the building where the carpenter and the carver were allowed to spend money.

Inside, the plan follows a standard Zen tripartite arrangement, but at generous scale. The gejin, or outer worship space, occupies the front. Behind it comes the ōma, the central bay, and behind that the naijin, the inner sanctuary housing the altar. The ōma is covered by an orage gōtenjō, a coffered ceiling whose perimeter curves upward before meeting the grid. It is the single most expensive ceiling type in Japanese religious carpentry, and its presence here says something about what the parish was willing to pay for.

Three other buildings at Daijuji were registered on the same day: the Founder's Hall of 1951 (No. 31-0293), the Monks' Hall of 1955 (No. 31-0294), and the Bell Tower of 1954 (No. 31-0295). The four were assessed as a group, and the main hall anchors it.

What to Look For on a Visit

The approach is a stone stairway, and the tree growing beside it is arguably the more famous attraction. This is the temple's uraku-tsubaki camellia, known in eastern Japan as taro-kaja, a variety associated with the tea master and daimyo Oda Urakusai. Estimates of its age range from about 400 to roughly 450 years. It stands 8.7 meters tall with a trunk girth of 1.85 meters and a crown spreading 10.5 meters, and Yazu Town has designated it a cultural property. Pale pink flowers open from late November and continue into early April, which makes winter an unexpectedly good time to come.

Inside the hall, the Shakyamuni Buddha is the principal image, but the altar area holds a good deal more: Yakushi Nyorai, the healing buddha; Bodhidharma, the semi-legendary founder of Zen; the sixteen arhats; and Daigen Shuri Bosatsu, a protective deity particular to Soto temples. Daijuji is a stamp station on three pilgrimage routes, the Chugoku Forty-Nine Yakushi circuit, the Inaba Yakushi circuit, and the Chugoku Rakuju Thirty-Three Kannon circuit, so the visitor book sees traffic that a temple of this size might not otherwise attract.

Practical matters. Daijuji is at 408 Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Yazu District, Tottori Prefecture 680-0307, and the telephone number is 0858-74-0854. Parking is available and free. By car it is roughly 20 minutes from JR Higashi-Kōge Station and about 30 minutes from the Kawahara interchange on the Tottori Expressway. There is a Yazu bus service toward Ochiiwa from Higashi-Kōge Station for those without a car. The grounds can be walked freely, but interior viewing and participation in zazen are arranged through the temple, which accepts sitters on request, so a phone call ahead is the sensible approach. The same applies to photography inside the hall. Renovation work within the compound was under way in the early 2020s following a change of abbot, and anyone planning a special trip should confirm the current situation.