Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall

What the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall Is

The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall (遠石八幡宮本殿, Toishi Hachimangū Honden) is the innermost sanctuary of a shrine on a hill in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, rebuilt in 1940 and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 24, 2013. The building is single storey, timber framed, roofed in sheet copper, and covers 39 square meters. Its form is sangensha Nagare-zukuri, a three-bay sanctuary whose roof sweeps forward over the approach.

A fire in 1936 destroyed the earlier shrine buildings. What stands today went up four years later. According to Shunan City's cultural affairs division, the rebuilding was overseen by Sunami Takashi, an engineer with the Home Ministry's Shrine Bureau, with Inagaki Hideo as designer. Sunami spent the 1920s and 1930s arguing against the standard shrine plan that inserted a separate inner gate between sanctuary and worship hall. He preferred a continuous chain of buildings, and that is what the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall sits at the head of.

Shrine tradition places the founding much earlier: a spirit of the Hachiman deity of Usa is said to have been enshrined here in 622, with a shrine building erected in 708. During the Heian period the shrine was counted among the branch shrines of Iwashimizu Hachimangū in Kyoto. The institution is old; this particular sanctuary is a product of the twentieth century.

Why It Was Registered

The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall was registered under the criterion covering buildings that serve as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a high quality example of a modern shrine sanctuary. Its registration number is 35-0078, the first of the eight numbers issued to Toishi Hachimangū on the same day in 2013.

The register itself was created in 1996 to protect buildings roughly fifty years old or more, working through notification rather than tight control. Twentieth century shrine architecture is exactly the kind of thing it was meant to catch.

What the assessors valued is the way traditional joinery was rebuilt with the materials and methods available in the late 1930s. The bracketing and gable ornament follow pre-modern precedent while the roof is sheet copper. A further round of repairs around 1955 left the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall much as visitors find it now.

Details Worth Looking For

The treatment of the forward roof slope is the first thing to notice. In most nagare-zukuri sanctuaries the space beneath that long sweep stays open. Here the sides have been walled in to form something closer to an antechamber. A veranda with a Kōran balustrade wraps the flanks and rear, and a flight of seven wooden steps drops from the front.

The carpenters distinguished between the two parts of the building through their columns. The core stands on round posts carrying flat three-block bracket sets; the forward extension uses square posts with simple boat-shaped bracket arms. Panelled doors close the sides of the core, while the extension has sliding doors.

Look up into the gable and you find a Kōryō beam supporting a Taiheizuka strut, flanked by carved oigata scrollwork. That carving is the one flourish on an otherwise restrained building. The eaves are double-tiered with closely spaced rafters, a fine ribbed pattern when seen from below.

One practical warning: the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall is enclosed by a latticed timber wall, so there is no clear frontal view. Most visitors see only the roof rising behind the worship hall. Walking around the precinct and looking through the lattice openings gives the best sight of the flank.

Visiting

The precincts of Toishi Hachimangū are open to visitors and there is no admission charge. The interior of the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Main Hall is not open to the public, and worship takes place at the worship hall in front of it. The office accepts requests for prayer rituals from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Photography for personal use is permitted in the grounds. The shrine treats photography, filming and drawing for commercial purposes as requiring prior permission, and asks visitors not to undertake such work unannounced.

By public transport, take a Bōchō Kōtsū bus from the front of JR Tokuyama Station and get off at Toishi Hachimangū-mae. Drivers should allow about 15 minutes from the Tokuyama-higashi interchange on the Sanyō Expressway; parking is free. The site is raised above the town, and the ground in front of the sanctuary looks out over Tokuyama Bay and the city.