Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall

What the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall Is

The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall (遠石八幡宮拝殿, Toishi Hachimangū Haiden) is the building where visitors to Toishi Hachimangū in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture make their prayers, completed in 1940 and placed on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 24, 2013. Single storey, timber framed and roofed in copper, it covers 149 square meters and is the largest of the eight structures registered here.

Its type has a name of its own: rōhaiden, a two-storey gatehouse floored over so that the passage through it becomes a room for worship. The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall puts an Irimoya-zukuri gatehouse three bays wide with three doorways at the centre, then runs a Kirizuma-zukuri wing out to each side, three bays long and two bays deep. Single-slope Kōhai canopies project front and back, their apexes riding up onto the ridges of the wings.

The building exists because of a fire. Flames took the shrine buildings in 1936, and the replacements were finished four years later. Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural properties database records that Sunami Takashi, who advised on shrine construction across Japan from the 1910s into the postwar years, served as consultant on the design; Shunan City names Inagaki Hideo as the architect.

Why It Was Registered

The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall was registered under the criterion for buildings that serve as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a rōhaiden carrying on the shrine architecture traditional to this part of Japan. Its registration number is 35-0080.

The rōhaiden is a regional form found around Shunan and eastern Yamaguchi. Elsewhere a worshipper passes through the gate and then stands before a separate hall; here the gate is the hall. Two functions occupy one structure, which is why the building reads as a gatehouse from outside and as a worship hall once you are standing in it. Choosing that local form for a new building in 1940, rather than a national standard plan, is much of what the assessors valued.

Sunami had spent years criticising the Meiji-era template that placed an inner gate between sanctuary and worship hall. He argued for sanctuary, offering hall and worship hall linked in one unbroken sequence. At Toishi that sequence is built: the offering hall joins the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall directly to the sanctuary behind. Repairs followed around 1955.

Details Worth Looking For

Look down first. The floor is not boarded but finished in imitation stone, level with the front half of the offering hall behind it. Because there is no step between them, the surface where worshippers stand and the surface where food offerings are carried run together as one plane.

Then look up. The bracketing changes as it moves outward from the centre. The upper storey of the gatehouse carries Mitesaki bracket sets thrown three steps forward; the canopies use a single block and arm; the wings make do with plain boat-shaped arms. Rafters follow the same logic, doubled over the upper storey and the canopies, single over the wings. Rank has been translated into the depth of a roof.

Standing square on to the front, you can see the apex of the canopy roof cutting into the ridge lines of the wings on either side. Three roof planes converge there, and it is the most demanding piece of carpentry on the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall. In clear weather the green patina of the copper reads sharply against the sky.

The gate stands directly in front, and the ritual vessel storehouse and food preparation hall sit behind the wings to right and left. The Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall anchors the group, with the latticed enclosure wall starting at the outer ends of its wings and running back around the sanctuary.

Visiting

The precincts of Toishi Hachimangū are open and there is no admission charge. Visitors pray at the front of the Toishi Hachiman Shrine Worship Hall. Requests for prayer rituals are taken from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and the shrine office answers the telephone from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Still photography and video for personal use are allowed in the grounds. Shooting or drawing for commercial purposes requires permission in advance, and the shrine declines such work when it is undertaken without notice.

Take a Bōchō Kōtsū bus from the front of JR Tokuyama Station to the Toishi Hachimangū-mae stop. By car it is about 15 minutes from the Tokuyama-higashi interchange on the Sanyō Expressway, with free parking. A flight of stone steps leads up to the precinct, and the ground in front of the worship hall gives a view over Tokuyama Bay and the city.