Hokki-ji

Hokki-ji is Horyu-ji without the coach parties. It stands about 2.5 km north of JR Horyuji Station, in the Okamoto district among rice fields and farmhouses, and you can see the pagoda across the fields well before you reach the gate.

That pagoda is 24 metres tall and was completed in 706, which makes it the oldest three-storey pagoda in Japan. The date comes from an inscription once fixed to its finial, known only from a Kamakura-period copy. Scholars argued for years that it was a forgery, until Aizu Yaichi's 1931 study showed that the copyist had made errors and the text could be trusted. Look up at the top storey: it is two bays wide, not three, much like the top of Horyu-ji's five-storey pagoda. An Edo-period repair widened it; the full dismantling in the 1970s put it back.

Tradition says Prince Shotoku lectured on the Lotus Sutra at his Okamoto Palace on this spot and, dying in 622, asked his son Yamashiro no Oe to make it a temple. A main hall followed in 638 and the pagoda took until 706. Excavation showed the main hall stood to the west and the pagoda to the east, the reverse of Horyu-ji's western precinct.

Inside the wall are the pagoda, a lecture hall rebuilt in 1694, a small Shoten hall on the site of the old main hall, and a storehouse holding the main image, an Eleven-faced Kannon about 3.5 metres tall, carved in the late tenth century with its head and body from a single cedar. Fifteen minutes covers it. Entry is 500 yen, cash only.

The better view is from outside. Local farmers plant cosmos in the fields around the temple, mostly on the east side, and from mid-October to early November the pagoda stands over them with the Yata hills behind. Red spider lilies on the field edges peak in late September, and in some years the two overlap.

From Horyu-ji, allow 25 to 30 minutes on foot. The lanes pass Horin-ji, whose three-storey pagoda burned after a lightning strike in 1944 and was rebuilt in 1975. Horin-ji's pagoda, Horyu-ji's five-storey pagoda and Hokki-ji's own three-storey pagoda are known together as the Ikaruga three pagodas.