Anakiri Shrine Main Hall

A Momoyama Sanctuary Hidden Behind Kofu's Apartment Blocks

The Main Hall of Anakiri Daijinja (穴切大神社本殿, the shrine name is also romanised Anagiri Daijinja) is a Momoyama-period shrine building in the Takara district of Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property on 13 May 1935. It is counted as a single structure, built in the ikkensha nagare-zukuri form and roofed with layered cypress bark.

Those two Japanese terms do a lot of work. Ikkensha means the sanctuary measures one bay across the front, with no intermediate pillar between the two corner posts. Nagare-zukuri describes what the roof does: the front slope keeps going past the wall line and reaches out over the steps, so the profile is deliberately lopsided, long in front and short behind. It is the commonest shrine form in Japan, which makes the individual handling of it the thing worth studying.

Here the handling is unmistakably late sixteenth century. Double doors at the front carry ornamental metal fittings. A plank veranda with a railing wraps the front and both flanks. Pigment survives in the carved members, and the kibana, the beak-shaped projections where beams pass through the pillars, follow the Zen-influenced zenshūyō vocabulary that spread through secular and religious carpentry in the Momoyama decades. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the building to the Momoyama period, roughly 1573 to 1614, without pinning a construction year; the three ridge tablets designated alongside it (tsuketari, supplementary items) have not produced a founding date.

The Lake That Was Drained

The shrine's name is a piece of geography turned into a story. Ana is a hole; kiri is to cut. According to the Kai no Kuni Shaki Jiki, a compilation of shrine and temple records for the old province of Kai, the Kofu Basin once lay under water. During the Wadō era (708 to 715) a provincial governor petitioned the court for permission to drain it, prayed to Ōnamuchi no Mikoto, the deity of land-making, and cut open the Kajikazawa outlet at the basin's southern rim so the water could run off into the Fuji River. Paddy fields replaced the lake. The deity was enshrined in thanks, and the court later granted the title Anakiri Daimyōjin.

Geology gives the legend an odd half-endorsement. The Kofu Basin was shaped by folding and volcanic activity rather than by a single drainage event, but standing water and marsh were widespread across it in earlier ages, and the surrounding district was known as Aonuma, a name pointing to ponds and swamps. Variants of the tale, called kesaki legends after the verb for kicking a mountain open, cluster all over Yamanashi. Anakiri Daijinja preserves one of the fullest versions.

The shrine was earlier called Kurotona Jinja and is treated as a candidate for a shrine of that name listed in the tenth-century Engishiki register. In 1603 the Tokugawa administration confirmed it a stipend of a little over five koku seven to of rice, held through the Edo period. Because the compound sits southwest of Kofu Castle, on the unlucky urakimon quarter, the garrison officers stationed at the castle treated it as a protective shrine, and a castle gate nearby carried the name Anakirimon. In 1872 it was ranked a gōsha, a district shrine.

What You Can and Cannot See

Be warned about the sightline before you go. The Important Cultural Property stands at the back of the compound, behind the worship hall and an inner gate, enclosed by a low wall. You cannot face it squarely. What is visible, and it is worth the walk, is the roof, the upper carving, and the colour on the projecting front canopy, seen at an angle over the enclosure.

The approach compensates. The entrance torii is wedged between a house and an apartment building on a narrow one-way street, easy to drive past twice. Beyond it the path bends at the zuijinmon, a two-storey gate of three bays with a single doorway, put up in 1794. Its carving is attributed to Tatekawa Washirō Tomimune, first master of the Suwa Tatekawa school, whose workshops supplied much of central Japan with architectural sculpture in the late Edo period; the gate is a municipally designated cultural property of Kofu City. To the right of the path stands a kagura stage with a mukai karahafu, an undulating gable facing forward. The worship hall in front of the sanctuary is a modern concrete building painted white, which throws the older timber into relief.

Local memory dwells on survival. Kofu lost most of its centre to firebombing on the night of 6 July 1945, and the shrine came through that and successive earthquakes intact, which earned it a reputation as a place where disaster passes by. A carved crow on the buildings is said in local tradition to be the work of Hidari Jingorō, the semi-legendary carpenter-sculptor, and to have been chained down so it could not fly off. Neither claim is documented, and both are best enjoyed as folklore.

Practical matters: the grounds are open at all hours and there is no admission charge. From JR Kofu Station the walk is about 1.2 kilometres to the southwest, fifteen to twenty minutes. A small free car park inside the compound holds roughly four vehicles, but the lane outside is one-way and tight. Photography in the grounds is not restricted, though the sanctuary itself can only be shot from beyond the enclosure. The shrine office is by the gate. Kofu Castle Park lies about ten minutes' walk east, which makes the two easy to combine.