Joninji Temple Main Hall

A Nichiren Hall Built Over Sixty Years

The Main Hall of Jōninji (常忍寺本堂, Joninji Hondō) is the principal worship hall of a Nichiren-school temple in the Gyōtoku district of Tottori City, Tottori Prefecture, completed in 1818, rebuilt in 1838, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 18 April 2008.

The temple's full name is Jūbōzan Jōninji (鷲峯山常忍寺). It takes the second half of that name from Toki Jōnin (富木常忍), later known as the priest Nichijō, a lay patron of Nichiren who is traditionally held to have come from Inaba, the old province that covers eastern Tottori. Founding a temple on his home ground was the wish of Yōjuin, a consort of Tokugawa Ieyasu and mother of the first lords of the Kishū and Mito branches. The wish passed to her son Yorinobu and then to his daughter Hōshin-in, who married Ikeda Mitsunaka, the first Ikeda lord of Tottori.

None of them lived to see it. Hōshin-in died in 1708, and it was Nichijun, abbot of her memorial temple Hōshinji, who finally acted. In 1741 he put up a thatched building on Hōshinji land at Honji village near the castle town and gave it the name Jōninji. The site straddled the processional route of the Tōshōgū festival and faced a watercourse, and the domain raised objections before permitting it.

Status followed quickly. In 1747 Jōninji was admitted as a guest-seat temple of Hokekyōji at Shōchūzan in Shimōsa, the head temple of its lineage, a rank above ordinary branch temple status. Building the hall took considerably longer. Two ridge tags found during a 2007 survey show that construction was vowed under the second abbot Nikken and only completed under the seventh, Nittai, in 1818. The work then stopped, started, and changed course again: the hall standing today is the result of a rebuilding carried out under the eighth abbot Nichō between 1836 and 1838.

Why the Hall Was Registered

Tottori's city centre has burned and shaken repeatedly. Fires swept the streets in the Edo and Meiji periods, the earthquake of 1943 levelled much of what remained, and air raids followed in 1945. Very few pre-modern wooden buildings came through. That scarcity is the first half of the case for registration, and the survey report that supported the application says so directly: the hall is an exceptional survivor in a townscape where disaster has been the norm.

The second half concerns the building itself. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes a south-facing hall of five bays with a hip-and-gable tiled roof and a one-bay canopied porch at the front, and calls the plan a typical example of the Nichiren main hall form whose detailing reflects its period accurately. Registration was granted under the criterion of being a model of design.

A note on terminology is useful for visitors. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) sits below an Important Cultural Property (重要文化財) and well below a National Treasure (国宝). Registration, available since 1996, protects buildings that remain in ordinary use, requiring notification before exterior changes rather than tight control. Jōninji was the fifth building in Tottori City to receive it.

The temple does hold one work at the higher rank. A painting on silk of Fugen and the ten rakshasa women, dated to the Kamakura period, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1904. Visitors should know that it is held in the custody of the Tokyo National Museum and is not on view at the temple.

What to Look For

Approach from the south and the porch comes first. Its three bays of frontage are treated as a single opening, with chamfered square posts standing on cut stone bases and tied by a beam carved in a wave-like profile. In the space above that beam sit two boards carved as frog-leg struts, each bearing a chrysanthemum crest. The bracket ends carry two different noses, a clenched-fist form on the tie beam and an elephant's head on the curved shrimp beam that links porch to hall.

Step up and the hall divides in the way Nichiren halls do. The front bay across the width forms the outer sanctuary; the four bays behind it are the inner sanctuary, raised a step as a dais room, with side compartments flanking the central space. A Buddhist altar stands toward the rear of the centre, under a canopy.

The pillars are the surprise. Six round columns roughly 39 centimetres in diameter stand along the front, and eight of about 45 centimetres carry the interior, all of them cut from mizume, a birch known in Japanese as mizumezakura and long treated as a cherry timber. Temple tradition holds that the wood was a gift from the Kishū Tokugawa house. The 2007 survey could not confirm this, though a Meiji-period temple history does record Kishū support, so the question stays open.

Each pillar tapers sharply just below its head into the form called chimaki, a Zen-style detail, and carries a three-bracket set with a clenched-fist nose. The ceiling over the central inner bay is coffered and coved; the side compartments and the outer sanctuary have simpler battened ceilings. Ink writing on the inner sanctuary ceiling is dated 1831, a fixed point in the middle of the long building campaign.

The altar platform repays close attention. Its canopy is built up with a head rail and a continuous plate, with bracket clusters set in a row above, a combination associated with the Zen style; the brackets themselves follow the native style, and the large blocks above the plate carry dish-shaped mouldings borrowed from the great Buddha style. Three architectural idioms meet in one piece of joinery, and none of them appears in the body of the hall. The altar and its shrine cabinet are lacquered in the Kishū manner.

In 1998 the hall was moved bodily to its present position on the site, its rear rooms renewed, its timbers above the rafters replaced, and its roof relaid from pantiles to a modified formal tiling with a slight upward curve. Old material below the cantilevered rafter beams survives well. The guest hall to the northeast, named Kansuirō, was moved at the same time; its upper floor keeps a refined sukiya interior and once framed a view of Mount Kyūshō.

The temple stands about 15 minutes on foot from Tottori Station, or a minute from the Jōninji-mae stop on the red route of the Kurunashi community bus, and free parking is available. Reports from visitors indicate that the grounds are open without charge, generally from around 9:00 to 17:00, though hours are not formally published and are worth confirming by telephone. The exterior can be photographed freely; ask at the temple office before entering the hall or taking pictures inside, and expect that funerals and memorial services may make a visit impossible on a given day.