The Kōyasan Reihōkan Museum: The Foundation of Temple Museums in Modern Japan

The observation that museums and religious sites resemble one another is not a new one. Goethe drew the comparison when visiting a Dresden gallery in 1768: “the freshly gilded frames, the well-waxed parquetry, the profound silence that reigned, created a solemn and unique impression, akin to the emotion experienced upon entering a House of God…the ornaments on exhibition…, as much as the temple that housed them, were objects of adoration in that place consecrated to the holy ends of art.”[i] William Hazlitt reached a similar conclusion visiting an English gallery in 1824, stating, “This is not a bazaar, a raree-show of art, a Noah’s ark of all the Schools…but a sanctuary, a holy of holies.”[ii] He declared a visit to an art gallery to be “like going a pilgrimage,” an “act of devotion performed at the shrine of Art!”[iii]

Such comparisons, however, between museums and religious sites—the transcendent objects on display, the contemplative atmospheres, the transformative experiences of visitors—are often tempered with similes and metaphors. Visits to galleries are like pilgrimages or akin to entering a church. Hazlitt describes the Louvre as Art’s “shrine” where “her votaries came and worshipped as in a temple [emphasis added].”[iv] It appears there remains a line in the sand between the museum proper and the church, the cathedral, and the temple—no matter how apparent their similarities may be to visitors.[v] This apparent division corresponds with a rift theorized in religious studies: one between the sacred and the profane, or, as Durkheim describes, “[the] division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane.”[vi] The sacred and profane, in this conception, are “separate genera,” “two worlds with nothing in common.”[vii] The strength of this binary persists in recent scholarship, where we still, as Carol Duncan has argued, tend to “think of churches and temples as religious sites, different in kind from secular sites such as museums, courthouses, or state capitols.”[viii]

However, museums and religious sites may not be as antithetical as once thought. Taking as my focus the establishment and development since the early 1900s of Japanese Buddhist ‘temple museums,’ broadly understood as museum-like facilities operated on temple grounds, my research highlights the ways Japanese temples have become potential stages for museological practices, undermining received notions of temples as fundamentally at odds with museums. I will present a case study of the Kōyasan Reihōkan Museum, founded in 1921, to illustrate the processes and possibilities of museological practices within Japanese Buddhist spaces. This paper—examining 1) the ‘material ecosystem,’ including architecture, which frames the Reihōkan’s display spaces, and 2) the ritualized performances carried out within the Reihōkan’s premises—supports the notion that ‘museum’ and ‘temple’ spaces, and museums and religious sites in general, are not as antithetical as once thought.

The theoretical basis for this paper rests upon theories of materiality and material religion (Ian Hodder and David Morgan), frame theory (Daniel Miller), and ritualization (Catherine Bell and Carol Duncan).[ix] Furthermore, my analysis builds off scholarship discussing the Reihōkan among other Japanese temple museums, including works by Christine Guth, Yui Suzuki, Pamela Winfield, Nagashima Fukutarō, Kawashima Tomoo, Umehara Hidekazu, and Nakajima Kintarō.[x] Finally, in addition to fieldwork conducted at the Reihōkan, my argument also relies upon archival materials including diaries and letters by persons integral to the Reihōkan’s establishment, accounts of the display space by early visitors, architectural diagrams, and sources like photographs, poetry, and postcards.

My research poses the following questions. How should we characterize museums in general and ‘temple museums’ specifically? How might the terms ‘museum’ and ‘museological practices’ be reassessed as spatiotemporally situated rather than immutable universals? How do people behave in temple museums as compared to temples and more ‘conventional’ museums, broadly construed? Ultimately, this research will further the study of religious museums by undermining received notions of a sacred-secular binary and demonstrating the untenability of treating museum and religious spaces as immutable types.

[i] Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, quoted in Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York: Universe Books, 1967), 160.

[ii] William Hazlitt, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (London: Taylor & Hessey, 1824), 3.

[iii] Hazlitt, Sketches, 6.

[iv] William Hazlitt, "The Elgin Marbles," in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 102.

[v] Goethe and Hazlitt’s observations are further discussed in Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 36-37.

[vi] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 34.

[vii] Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 36.

[viii] Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 90.

[ix] Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of Relationships Between Humans and Things (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); David Morgan, The Thing About Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[x] Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Yui Suzuki, “Temple as Museum, Buddha as Art: Hōryūji’s Kudara Kannon and Its Great Treasure Repository,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 (Autumn 2007): 128-140; Pamela D. Winfield, “Curating Culture: The Secularization of Buddhism through Museum Display,” in Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition, ed. Richard K. Payne (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2021), 95-114; Nagashima Fukutarō, “Kōyasan Reihōkan no kaisetsu,” Nihon rekishi 608 (1999): 60-64; Kawashima Tomoo, “Taishō-ki shaji hōmotsukan no kenchiku igi,” Kachō hakubutsukan-gaku kenkyū 17 (2010): 21-51; Umehara Hidekazu, "Kōyasan reihōkan no setsuritsu katei ni kan suru ichi kōsatsu," Indogaku Bukkyōgaku kenkyū 63, no. 2 (2015): 1082-1079; Nakajima Kintarō, "Bukkaku hakubutsukan no teigi oyobi gainen ni kan suru kenkyū," Kankōgaku ronshū 15 (2020): 1-12.