Dairakuji Temple Priests' Quarters

Raised in the Months After the Town Burned

Dairakuji Priests' Quarters (大楽寺庫裏, also written Dairaku-ji Kuri) is the residential and service building of a Jōdo-sect Buddhist temple at Tatemachi 2-9 in Imizu City, Toyama Prefecture, dated to 1869 (Meiji 2) and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 12 June 1997.

A kuri is the working half of a Japanese temple. Where the main hall handles ritual, the kuri holds the kitchen, the living rooms of the priest's family, the offices, and the reception rooms where parishioners are received for funerals, memorial services and the ordinary business of a congregation. At Dairakuji it is the larger of the two registered buildings: two storeys of timber under a tiled roof, with a building area of 399 square metres against the main hall's 263.

The roof form is kirizuma-zukuri, a straightforward gable, and the entrance is placed on the gable end rather than along the eaves side. Japanese architectural vocabulary calls this arrangement tsumairi, and it gives the approach a different character from the wide, horizontal frontage of an eaves-side entry. What faces the visitor is the triangular end of the building, its ridge running away into the compound.

The date comes from the building itself. A munafuda, the wooden ridge tag on which builders recorded the date and circumstances of construction, places the work in the ninth month of Meiji 2, immediately after the fire that swept the port town of Hōjōzu, the district now generally called Shinminato. The congregation did not wait. The priests' quarters went up in the same season as the disaster; the main hall was not completed until 1879, a full decade later.

Registered for the Townscape It Holds Together

Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties was created by an amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties that took effect on 1 October 1996. Unlike designation, which selects a small number of buildings and governs them through permits, registration works by notification and advice, and was designed to catch the large and varied stock of modern-era buildings that were disappearing before anyone had time to assess them.

Three criteria admit a building to the register: that it contributes to the historic landscape of the country, that it is a model of design, or that it would not be easy to reproduce. The priests' quarters and the main hall entered under different criteria, and the difference is instructive. The main hall qualified as difficult to reproduce, a judgement about its earthen-walled construction. The priests' quarters qualified under the first criterion, for its contribution to the historic landscape. Its registration number is 16-0013, dated 12 June 1997, with public notice on 24 June.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs description explains the reasoning in a phrase: the building recalls the extensive monastic complex the temple once maintained. Scale is doing the work here. A kuri of 399 square metres implies a household and a congregation of some size, and its bulk still governs how the surrounding block reads.

The same description records a piece of local memory: the building is also said to have served the town as a temporary elementary school. The Agency notes this as something transmitted rather than documented, and it is worth repeating in the same spirit. Temples across Japan lent their reception rooms to the new compulsory school system in the 1870s, before purpose-built schoolhouses existed, and a large tatami hall was exactly the asset a town in that position needed.

A Tea-House Hall and a Farmhouse Ceiling Under One Roof

The interior is where the building becomes interesting, because it does two different things at once.

Part of it is sukiya in manner. Sukiya-zukuri grew out of the tea room: slender members, subdued surfaces, an avoidance of the heavy bracketing and formal symmetry of ceremonial architecture, with attention paid instead to the grain of a post or the proportion of an opening. The great hall of the kuri is finished in this register, which is the vocabulary a temple would reach for when receiving guests.

Other rooms go the opposite way. Their beams are left exposed overhead in the manner of a minka, the timber farmhouse of the Japanese countryside, where structure is displayed rather than concealed and the members are sized for load rather than for refinement. Looking up in one of these rooms and then walking into the great hall makes the contrast plain: the same building addressing formal occasions and daily household life in two separate languages.

Seeing any of this requires arrangement. Dairakuji is an active parish temple with no ticket office, and both interiors are opened by advance telephone booking (0766-82-3016). No admission charge or fixed opening hours are posted. A talk on the temple's history can be requested at the same time. Photography of the exterior raises no issue; ask before photographing inside.

From the Manyōsen tram, Shinmachiguchi stop is about a ten-minute walk away. The Imizu community bus on the Shinminato-Kosugi line stops at Kagurabashi-guchi, roughly three minutes on foot, and drivers should allow about 25 minutes from the Kosugi interchange of the Hokuriku Expressway. The temple sits a short walk from the Uchikawa canal, where fishing boats moor directly behind the houses, and the main hall registered on the same day stands in the same compound.