Banshō-ji Temple

Overview

Banshō-ji (萬松寺) is a Buddhist temple in the Ōsu district of central Nagoya, Japan. It belongs to the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism, and it stands at 29, Ōsu 3-chōme, a short walk from the shops and street food stalls that now fill the neighbourhood. The temple was founded in 1540, during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), in the ninth year of the Tenbun era (天文), by the warlord Oda Nobuhide.

Its site today is not its original one. Banshō-ji was rebuilt in 1610 at its present location, and it is the building from that rebuilding that the temple owns and maintains. The temple is small, but its history touches two of the most famous figures of Japanese unification: Oda Nobuhide, who founded it, and Katō Kiyomasa, who used it as his base while Nagoya Castle was being built.

History

Oda Nobuhide (1510?–1552) was a powerful warlord of Owari Province, the region around modern Nagoya. In 1540 he founded Banshō-ji as a Sōtō Zen temple in the village of Nagoya as it then existed, and he invited a priest named Daiun to open it. The Tenbun era, during which this happened, ran from 1532 to 1555, so the founding falls in the middle of a century of constant warfare between regional lords.

Nobuhide was the father of Oda Nobunaga, the warlord who would later begin the military unification of Japan. Founding and endowing temples was one of the ways a provincial lord asserted authority, secured religious patronage, and left a mark on the landscape of his territory.

The temple's second famous connection is Katō Kiyomasa (1562–1611), one of the most celebrated generals of the age. Kiyomasa stayed at Banshō-ji and used it as his quarters while he was engaged in the construction of Nagoya Castle. That castle was built from 1610 onward by Tokugawa Ieyasu as the administrative centre of his newly consolidated domain in Owari. In 1610, the same year the castle works were under way, Banshō-ji was rebuilt at its present site in Ōsu.

What Stands There Today

The temple sits directly on a main street in Ōsu, and its stone gate opens straight onto the pavement, so the boundary between the temple grounds and the surrounding shopping district is thin. Two kitsune (狐, きつね) — fox spirits, in English — guard the entrance. In Japanese folk religion the fox is the messenger of Inari, the deity associated with rice, fertility and prosperity, and fox statues commonly flank the gates of temples and shrines connected with that worship.

Many paper lanterns light the approach, and they are a conspicuous feature of the temple's frontage on the street. The temple owns the building that stands on the site, the structure dating from the 1610 rebuilding.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 萬松寺. It is read ばんしょうじ in kana, and romanised as Banshō-ji. The long final vowel is written with a macron: Banshō, not Bansho.

Broken down character by character:

• 萬 — read ばん (ban) in this name. This is an older, formal form of the character 万, meaning "ten thousand". It is the same character used in the name of the Tenbun era's own era-name system and in many pre-modern temple and place names; modern Japanese usually replaces it with the simpler 万.
• 松 — read しょう (shō) in this name. It means "pine tree". Pines are a standard motif in Zen temple names and in Japanese art generally, associated with endurance and with the evergreen constancy of the Buddhist teaching.
• 寺 — read じ (ji) in this name. It means "temple". This character appears at the end of the names of a great many Buddhist temples in Japan, and it is the element that tells a reader immediately that the place is a temple rather than a shrine.

So the whole name means something like "Temple of the Ten Thousand Pines". The reading of 寺 as ji rather than tera is the usual one in compound temple names; tera is the standalone word for a temple. Note also that 萬松 is read Banshō with a long ō, while the final 寺 is voiced as ji — the three characters together give the full name in five kana: ば・ん・しょ・う・じ.

Visiting and Context

Banshō-ji is in Ōsu, one of central Nagoya's busiest districts, known for its shopping streets, second-hand clothing shops, electronics, and street food. The temple is not a secluded mountain foundation; it is a working urban temple embedded in a commercial neighbourhood, and visitors encounter it as part of a walk through Ōsu rather than as a separate excursion.

The coordinates of the site are 35.1591667, 136.9047222, placing it in the flat coastal plain of the Nōbi region on Japan's main island of Honshu. Nagoya Castle, the project that brought Katō Kiyomasa to the temple, stands a short distance to the north, and the castle's construction in 1610 is the event that ties the temple's present site to the political history of the city.

For readers of Japanese, the temple's name is a useful study case: it contains an old-form character (萬) that modern texts often simplify, a nature element common in Zen names (松), and the standard temple suffix (寺) whose reading shifts between ji and tera depending on whether it appears in a compound or on its own.