Shunpurou

The Pagoda That Was Never Finished

Shunpūrō (春風楼, also written Shunpuro) is a two-storey timber pavilion standing in the southwestern corner of the Hōfu Tenmangū shrine precinct in Hōfu, Yamaguchi Prefecture; completed in 1873, it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 13 August 2012.

Approach it from the front and you climb a flight of stone steps to a building roughly 17.5 metres square, its hipped-and-gabled roof laid with pantiles, a veranda running round all four sides. It reads as a pavilion, and it was built to serve as a sanrōjo, a hall where worshippers kept overnight vigil.

Then crouch and look underneath.

What supports the floor is not ordinary joinery. Packed into the underfloor structure are kumimono, the interlocking bracket complexes of blocks and bearing arms that carry the deep eaves of a Japanese temple building. These were cut for the first storey of a five-storey pagoda that was never raised.

Mōri Narihiro, tenth lord of the Chōshū domain, resolved to build a pagoda at the shrine and had the ground-blessing rite and the first ceremonial cut performed at Daisenbō in the sixth month of Bunsei 5 (1822). Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property record traces the plan back further, to 1819. Funds were still being raised when the project stalled in Tenpō 2 (1831), and the turmoil of the closing decades of the shogunate finished it off. The timbers sat. Half a century after the ground was blessed, a new design turned the abandoned pagoda into a tiered pavilion, and the building was completed in the sixth year of Meiji.

A scale model of the intended pagoda is understood to survive as the small five-storey pagoda at Reikōin, now designated by the city of Yamaguchi and no longer in the shrine's hands. It is the closest anyone can come to seeing what Narihiro had in mind.

Why the Register Lists It

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is a lighter form of protection than designation as an Important Cultural Property. It was created in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more, and it works through notification and guidance rather than tight control, which suits structures that remain in daily use. Shunpūrō was listed under the criterion of contribution to the historic landscape, with registration number 35-0071.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the result as a distinctive form of shrine architecture in the manner of a pavilion, and the phrasing is careful. Shrine buildings in Japan do not usually look like this. The proportions belong to a pagoda, the roof and veranda to a pavilion, the function to a vigil hall, and the underfloor bracketry to a Buddhist structure that a Shinto shrine absorbed after the separation of the two religions had already been ordered by the new government. Very few buildings carry that sequence of decisions so plainly.

Shunpūrō is also the oldest of the major buildings now standing in the precinct. Fire destroyed the earlier main sanctuary in 1952, and the present main hall, offering hall and worship hall were rebuilt in the following decade under the guidance of the Kyoto University architectural historian Murata Jirō, with drawings by Sugiyama Shinzō. Those replacements have since been registered in their own right. The pavilion that was left over from a failed pagoda outlasted the buildings it was meant to accompany. Repairs were carried out in 1984 and again in 2005.

Visiting Hōfu Tenmangū

Hōfu Tenmangū enshrines Sugawara no Michizane, the Heian-period scholar and courtier who became the deity of learning, and the shrine claims foundation in 904, the year after his death, which would make it the first Tenjin shrine in Japan. Michizane is said to have stopped at Hōfu on the journey into his exile in Kyushu. Together with Kitano Tenmangū in Kyoto and Dazaifu Tenmangū in Fukuoka it is counted among the three great Tenjin shrines.

The precinct is open and there is no admission charge, so Shunpūrō can be looked at whenever the shrine is accessible. The underfloor brackets, which are the whole point of the building, are visible from the ground without entering anything. Use of the upper floor is tied to shrine events and rites rather than general sightseeing, so anyone hoping to go up should ask at the shrine office first.

The pavilion sits high enough to look out over the roofs of Hōfu towards the Suō Sea, and its name, which means roughly the pavilion of spring wind, was chosen with that outlook in mind. The forecourt in front of it is where the year-men throw beans at the Setsubun rite in early February, part of the same day as the ushikae bull-drawing rite that decides who will pull the sacred ox at the autumn festival. The precinct's plum trees, some sixteen varieties, flower from the middle of February into early March.

From JR Hōfu Station the shrine is a walk of about fifteen minutes north along the approach, or a short bus ride. Photography in the grounds is unrestricted. Allow thirty to forty minutes for the shrine alone; the treasure hall and the tea house Hōshōan, where a bowl of matcha can be had for a fee, will fill out a longer visit.