Zuishoan Temple Gate

A Thatched Gate with a Satsuma Crest

Zuishōan Sanmon (瑞松庵山門), the main gate of the Sōtō Zen temple Zuishōan in the Funaki district of Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture, is a thatched two-storey gate built in 1937 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 26 February 2021.

It is small. The frontage measures 3.1 metres, a single bay, with short flanking walls to left and right. Gates of this type at older Zen temples often run to three bays and carry a heavy tiled roof; this one wears thatch and sits at the head of a flight of steps rising from the prefectural road, facing north.

The construction repays a slow look. On the lower level the main posts are chamfered square timbers, with supporting posts set fore and aft and tied to them by three tiers of horizontal nuki penetrating ties. Nothing is walled in; you walk straight through. The upper level switches to round columns, three bays by three, with the central bay of each face left open and a balustrade of the Zen style running round the veranda. Square below, round above, closed by nothing on either level: the gate reads as a frame rather than a barrier.

Carved in two places is a circle enclosing a cross, the crest of the Shimazu, lords of Satsuma at the far end of Kyushu. It is there because the fourth abbot of Zuishōan, Chūō Shuhō, was a son of Shimazu Motohisa, seventh head of that house. The temple's parent temple was Fukushōji in what is now Kagoshima, and its founding abbot Sekioku Shinryō also came from Satsuma, so the crest records an institutional lineage rather than a patron's donation.

A Temple of 1411 and a Gate of 1937

Zuishōan was established in the Funaki area early in the fifteenth century. The Sōtō school's own temple directory dates the founding to 1411, when the monk Jōan Shuzen built a hermitage here and invited his teacher Sekioku Shinryō to serve as founding abbot; Yamaguchi Prefecture's tourism record gives 1417 instead. The mountain name, Shukuyūzan, was taken from a peak in China that the hill behind the temple was thought to resemble. Both the Ōuchi and later the Mōri extended protection, and the temple retains a substantial holding of old documents.

The gate is more than five centuries younger than the institution it fronts. A stone tablet beside it records that the ridgepole was raised on 18 May 1937, and names Kurashige Kyūbei as the donor. Kurashige came from a family that had served as an official post-station inn keeper in the Edo period and ran a kimono business and a sake brewery. That a gate of the late 1930s should be roofed in thatch rather than tile was already a conservative choice at the time, and it is part of why the Agency for Cultural Affairs listed the structure under the criterion of contribution to the historic landscape, noting that despite its modest scale it composes the frontage of an old temple.

Thatch demands attention that tile does not. A roof of this kind needs relaying every ten to fifteen years, and the current covering was laid in April 2020. The work is a recurring commitment for a small temple, and the head priest has spoken publicly about sustaining it.

What to Look for on a Visit

The grounds are open and there is no admission charge. You can walk through the gate to the main hall, and the usual courtesies of a working Zen temple apply: quiet, no entry to the residential quarters, and consideration during services.

Turn round once you are inside. The view back through the gate opening frames the Sanyō Shinkansen line beyond, and trains pass through that rectangle at speed several times an hour. In cherry blossom season photographers gather for exactly this shot, and catching a sixteen-car train inside a 3.1-metre opening is harder than it sounds.

The garden was laid out to work with the natural slope, and azaleas in late spring and maples in autumn are what most visitors come for outside the blossom season. The precinct also holds graves and memorials worth pausing at: Senrin-ni, a nun of the closing years of the shogunate who raised funds for bridges and road building, the family graves of Naitō Motomori, a Mōri retainer whose life ended badly in the early seventeenth century, and a monument to Mōri Tokiko, an early figure in women's education in the province. A torii still standing in the grounds is a survival from the centuries when Buddhist and Shinto worship shared a site.

From JR Ube Station, take a Senbetsu bus towards Funaki, about fifteen minutes, and get off at Ōno; the temple is a minute's walk. By car the gate is directly visible from Prefectural Route 30, the Ube-Funaki road, with the steps leading up from it. Photography of the gate and grounds is unrestricted.