Hōkai-in, Buddhist temple in Kita-ku, Japan

Hōkai-in is a Shingon temple in Kita-ku, Okayama, formally named Kongōzan Henjō-ji Hōkai-in. Its main hall was built in 1855, at the end of the Edo period, and its mountain gate dates from the Kaei era (1848–1854). The temple moved to this site in 1581 after a fire destroyed its earlier buildings.

According to tradition, the temple was founded around 729 by the monk Hōon as one of the forty-eight temples of Bizen, then called Myōtō-ji and standing at the foot of Mount Kasai north of the present site. Its halls burned during the Sengoku period, and in 1581 it was moved to its current location. The monk Denshin revived it in the early Edo period, and it received the patronage of the Ikeda family, lords of Okayama. The main hall dates from 1855 and the mountain gate from the Kaei era (1848–1854).

Hōkai-in is the fifth stop on the Chugoku Thirty-Three Kannon Pilgrimage and the seventh on the 108 Kannon route. Its main image, a standing Sho-Kannon, is a hidden Buddha shown only once every 33 years. The temple is a single independent Shingon establishment, not part of a larger school network.

The temple is accessible by bus from JR Okayama Station, and parking is available on-site for those arriving by car. The grounds are small enough to visit without much time, so combining it with other nearby stops is easy.

The temple holds a Kannon statue carved from a single cypress trunk, dating from the mid-Heian period and classified as a National Important Cultural Property in Japan. What makes this notable is how rare it is to find wooden figures of this age still in active religious use at a local temple.