Shojuji Temple Annex

A Room That Moved House

The Detached Guest Room of Shojuji Temple (正住寺離れ座敷, Shōjūji Hanare-zashiki) is a 1920 single-storey reception building in Higashinagamachi, Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 28 June 2017. It stands on the north side of the approach that runs from the temple gate to the main hall.

It has stood there since 2013. Before that it spent ninety-three years somewhere else entirely.

The building was put up in Taisho 9 (1920) by the Ikenaga family in Hashimoto, at the eastern end of Wakayama Prefecture where the Kinokawa river comes down from the Nara border. It was a hanare-zashiki, a detached guest room: a separate small building in which a household of means received visitors, held formal occasions, and kept the good rooms away from daily domestic noise. In 2013 it was dismantled, carried across the prefecture to the old castle town on the coast, and reassembled in the precinct of a Nichiren temple.

Why the Move Matters

Relocation is a complicated thing in Japanese heritage practice. A building's setting is usually considered part of what makes it worth protecting, and a structure that has left its original ground has lost an argument for its own significance. Registered Tangible Cultural Property status, introduced in 1996 as a lighter-touch instrument than designation, has more room for cases like this one.

The registration criterion applied here says as much. Of the three grounds available, the Agency for Cultural Affairs registered this building as one that constitutes a model of design. Not as a contributor to the historic landscape, which is the criterion used for the majority of registered structures and the one that a relocated building could not easily satisfy. The value the state recognised is in the carpentry, and carpentry travels.

The move also almost certainly saved it. A detached guest room is the first part of a large house to become surplus, and a 1920 timber annexe in a provincial town has no obvious future once the family that built it no longer needs a formal reception space. The temple gave it a use again. The registration number is 30-0223.

The Carpentry

The building runs six bays along its length and three and a half in depth, single storey, under a hipped roof of pantiles. Floor area is 62 square metres, which is small: this was never a house, only the best rooms of one.

Inside are two tatami rooms in sequence. The upper room is ten mats, the lower room seven and a half, and they open into one another as a continuous formal suite. Both the front and the rear elevations carry an uchien, an interior veranda set within the outer wall line rather than projecting beyond it, which gives the rooms a buffer of circulation space on two sides. A porch with its own hipped-and-gabled roof attaches at the southwest corner, on the front side of the lower room.

The upper room takes the finer work. Its tokonoma alcove is a bay and a half wide and built in two levels rather than one, an arrangement that gives the display space depth and shadow instead of a flat recess. Beside it is a tsukeshoin, the built-in writing alcove with a low window that marks a room as belonging to the shoin tradition of formal Japanese interiors. The joinery around the seating area uses cedar and cypress, worked with restraint. The Agency's assessment settles on the word tanseina, which translates roughly as composed or well-ordered, and the point is that this room is not showing off. It is expensive and quiet at the same time.

That combination is characteristic of the late Taisho period, when merchant and landowning families across western Japan were commissioning shoin rooms of considerable refinement without the sumptuary constraints that had governed such work under the Tokugawa. What survives here is a well-made example of that moment, transplanted.

Shojuji, and Visiting

Shojuji is a Nichiren temple with the mountain name Shokenzan. Its founding date is not recorded. It sits in the grid of the old castle town of Wakayama, in a district that has held temples for centuries, and it continues as an active parish temple with a cemetery in regular use.

The guest room is not an exhibition building. It has no opening hours, no admission, and no arrangement for public viewing of the interior, so the tokonoma and the tsukeshoin are not on general view. What is available is the exterior, seen from the approach between the gate and the main hall, where the low hipped roof and the porch at the corner read clearly. Anyone hoping to see more should contact the temple in advance rather than assume access.

Reaching it is easy. Wakayamashi Station, served by the Nankai Main Line, the Nankai Wakayamako Line, and the JR Kisei Main Line, is roughly ten minutes away on foot to the north. The temple stands in a quiet block of narrow streets that gives a fair impression of how this part of the city was laid out before the twentieth century rearranged it.

One footnote for anyone travelling in the prefecture. The building came from Hashimoto, an hour or so inland by train, which is also where the Kurokomichi pilgrimage route to Koyasan begins. The two ends of the journey this building has made are both worth a day.