Zuiganji

photo by 663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0

The cedar avenue is gone: salt from the 2011 tsunami killed three hundred of the trees.

You go in along a bare avenue (salt from the 2011 tsunami killed the cedars, and about three hundred of them were felled), with the rock face beside it riddled with caves, where for centuries memorial tablets for the dead were carved. At the far end is the great hall of 1609: thirty-eight metres of frontage, ten rooms in a row, and in the one reserved for the lord the floor is raised by one step.

Zen temple founded in the ninth century and rebuilt by Date Masamune, who had the main hall built in 1609, bringing in craftsmen from Kyoto and the Kansai. The hall measures 38 metres across the front by 24.2 deep and 17.3 high at the ridge, and is divided into ten rooms (the peacock room, the falcon room, the chrysanthemum room, the pine room) with painted sliding panels; the paintings you see today are copies made from 1985 onwards, and the originals are in the temple museum. The main hall and the kitchen with its corridor have been National Treasures since 1953. The caves along the avenue are what remains of twelve small temples that stood six on each side: the oldest visible one is from the seventeenth century, but traces dating back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been found under the rock.

ℹ️ Tickets 1,000 yen for adults (university and high school students included), 500 for junior high and elementary school pupils; with thirty people it drops to 900 and 400. Opens at 8:30 all year and closes at 17:00 from April to September, at 16:30 in March and October, at 16:00 in February and November, and at 15:30 in January and December; last entry is half an hour before. The temple itself reckons on thirty to forty minutes for a visit. It has no car park of its own. It is ten minutes' walk from Matsushima-Kaigan Station, twenty-five from Matsushima Station.

🚉 Matsushima-Kaigan · 7 min walk

Sources: zuiganji.or.jp · zuiganji.or.jp · zuiganji.or.jp · mlit.go.jp

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