Nishi Honganji Temple and Osaka Castle
Legacy of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Last month, I wrote an article about Hiunkaku, a tower located in a corner of Nishi Honganji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. In that article, I also mentioned that according to legend, Hiunkaku was moved from the Jurakudai castle built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In fact, there are other structures in Nishi Honganji that are said to have been moved from Hideyoshi’s castles.
One is a gorgeous gate called Kara-mon.
Kara-mon (唐門) literally means the gate of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) in China. However, it actually has nothing to do with either Tang or Chinese architectural styles. The style in which the center of the eaves of the roof is raised in a semicircular shape is called a karahafu (唐破風, Tang-style gable), but this style does not exist in China.
In Japan, there was a tradition of describing foreign luxury goods as “Tang,” but in reality, it had nothing to do with China, or even luxury goods made in Japan were sometimes described as Tang.
This tradition also applies to the Ryukyu Kingdom (now Okinawa). In Okinawa, the sweet potato native to Central America was called karaimo (唐芋, Tang potato). It means a potato introduced from overseas. And in Satsuma (now Kagoshima), where the sweet potato was introduced from Ryukyu, it was called the…
