Ninjadera

There is a temple in Kanazawa colloquially known as "ninjadera" or "ninja temple" which has absolutely nothing to do with ninjas, and never did.  However, it is still supposed to be worth a visit, and since it is all of a fifteen minute bus ride from our apartment, we went to check it out.

For all of their protestations of being not-ninja-related, the temple proved well camouflaged, hiding down a side street with no sign on the main road.  That's the back of it at the end of the alleyway.

The back door didn't look attended, so we went around to the front rather than ending up someplace we weren't supposed to be.

 From the main entrance we could see that it was open and there were people inside.

 The exterior is pretty standard for Japanese temples.

We passed this on the way in and Ana mentioned that on the ghost tour in Tokyo she took with her mother the guide explained that this type of sticker has one's name, and the goal is to get it as high on the shrine as possible - the higher it is, the better the gods can theoretically hear you.

All the really cool stuff was inside.  Unfortunately, photography is not permitted inside, so we couldn't document that stuff for you visually.  The temple can't be explored on your own, because it is both quite old and very complicated inside, so the only method is by one of the tours offered by temple staff.  The tours are in Japanese but they have guidebooks that they give foreigners with basically a word-by-word breakdown of what is being said, which means that we got a lot more information than usual about what we were seeing.

The temple was built after the Tokugawa Shogunate had assumed total power in Japan and begun making strict laws to make sure that nobody could challenge that power.  One set of laws with that intention involved, basically, building codes.  The Shogun wanted to limit the types of defensive structures that could be constructed by forces not under his control.  One thing you weren't supposed to do was build structures with more than three stories, exactly why I'm not sure.  There were probably other limits, but we didn't get a lot of information on Shogun-era building codes.  

Anyway, the local lords of Kanazawa, the Maedas, wanted to have some strongpoints outside of Kanazawa Castle to watch the landscape for evildoers and provide havens for soldiers and spies on the move.  Ninjadera is a temple, but was constructed to be an extremely defensible temple that doubled as a lookout post and military strongpoint, and they built a number of fairly fiendish defensive mechanisms into it that the tour told us about and sometimes demonstrated.

For instance, some of the stairs leading into the main temple from the outside have rice-paper risers.  From a secret chamber under the stairs, one could see the feet of the enemy approaching through the rice paper without being seen oneself, and do violence upon said feet with spears or other weapons if appropriate.  The rest of the stairs being solid, it was possible to retreat from this attack position without the enemy being able to pursue.

If they made it past the stairs, just inside the main doors to the temple is what is normally a very large in-floor offering box covered by a wooden grating.  Remove the wooden grating, and suddenly you have a deep pit trap in which could be covered by something thin to snare the unwary, or just left uncovered for people running inside on the attack to fall into.  There are several pit traps in key doorways and connecting hallways throughout the temple.

Past the pit traps the main temple area can be found.  Several of what appear to be walls are actually mesh doors to dark alcoves, where the guards inside can see out through the bamboo mesh, ready to leap out and do bad things to people.  

Past those guards, the structure of the temple itself starts to get really tricky.  The outside of the building appears to have three (perhaps slightly larger than normal) floors, but inside there are actually seven levels.  An interconnecting maze of full-height and half-height rooms and tunnels offers easy transit in any direction to someone who knows the temple well, while being a complete mess for the ignorant. Lots of one-way doors, secret tunnels with locking doors, hidden staircases in closets, and the like, along with an escape passage that is supposed to lead outside the temple grounds to the castle that is actually located inside the temple's well.  There are also hidden rooms and compartments if simply hiding seems a better choice than fighting or running, though one of the hidden rooms was intended for use by a lord or commanding officer who needed a good place to commit suicide.  That room's door can't be opened from the inside once closed.  There was at least one room that, standing in it, there was no obvious way out - all the doors connecting to that room were concealed in some way.  The whole thing was pretty cool and we understood everything that was being said on the tour from the book, which was a real treat. The Japanese website has some pictures of the various traps and hidden stairs here, but again it is in Japanese and the pictures are fairly small.

All in all, a pleasant little visit to a place intended to be unpleasant for uninvited guests.  I guess when you pay for the tour they don't feel the need to spear your feet through the front stairs.