Red Armor with Helmet and Large Sleeves

One Armour, National Treasure since 1953

Red Armor with Helmet and Large Sleeves (赤絲威鎧, Akaito Odoshi Yoroi) is a Kamakura-period craft object owned by Kushihiki Hachimangu in Hachinohe City, Aomori Prefecture, made an Important Cultural Property on 26 March 1915 and designated a National Treasure on 14 November 1953. The quantity is one suit.

The measure word is the one used for suits of armour, appearing here for the first time among the words for buildings, figures, blades, scrolls, boxes, towers and pieces met so far.

Aomori Prefecture gives the address as 3 Hachiman-cho, Hachiman, Hachinohe City, and records it as on view for a fee. The address field in the Agency's database is blank, the second such case after the Hosoge sutra box.

Paired with a National Treasure of the Same Name

Another National Treasure carries the same name.

Aomori Prefecture records that the armour is held by tradition to have belonged to Emperor Chokei, and that it and the red-laced armour at Kasuga Taisha in Nara are spoken of as the twin peaks of east and west, showing the height of Kamakura metalwork.

Kasuga Taisha holds a red-laced armour too, and the two are called a matched pair.

At Himeji Castle, buildings of nearly the same name stood as National Treasure and as Important Cultural Property. With the Saibara-fu, one title covered properties in Saga and Tokyo differing in category and measure word. With the chrysanthemum waist sword, two properties of one name differed in period.

Those were recorded separately and never compared. Here the record sets two properties side by side.

They are distinguished by east and west, with neither placed above the other.

The Shape of a Fitting Became the By-Name

The by-name is explained in the record.

Aomori Prefecture writes that fittings in the form of the character for one are set boldly over the sprays of many-petalled chrysanthemum on the helmet crest plate, the turnbacks and the shoulder guards, and that the armour is therefore also called the chrysanthemum-and-one armour.

A metal fitting shaped like the character for one sits over a chrysanthemum pattern. The two together make the name.

The Mikazuki Munechika took its by-name from a pattern in the steel, the chrysanthemum waist sword from carving on a hilt, the Sofukuji first gate from characters on its plaques.

Here the shape of an applied fitting gives the name, and it combines two things: a flower pattern and the form of a written character.

The lacing is described too: black lacquered scales laced with braid dyed in madder, with gilt chrysanthemum ornament worked in repoussé. The red comes from madder.

The Name Is Written with an Older Character or a Newer One

The title is written differently from record to record.

The Agency uses the older form of the character for thread. Aomori Prefecture and the shrine use the modern form.

They are the same character in its old and new shapes, and the records differ in which they use.

With the ceremonial sword on a pear-skin ground, the title used older variant forms of two characters: the same words written another way.

At Osasahara Shrine, the shrine's name and the address used two distinct characters that share a reading but differ in sense.

This case is old form against new form. This article follows the Agency and keeps the older character.

Seeing It

The armour belongs to Kushihiki Hachimangu, and Aomori Prefecture records it as on view for a fee. It is shown in the shrine's treasure hall.

The helmet is described closely: a bowl of black lacquered iron plates joined with rivets called stars, the stars in twenty-four rows, with a crest plate of chrysanthemum sprays over the peak and a heavy pair of horns.

The stars are counted in rows. The Nagamitsu naginata has three peg holes and the Goto Toshiro dagger four; parts are counted in these records.

The shrine records that its two National Treasure armours and three further armours listed as Important Cultural Properties represent Japanese armourers' work.

Five suits of armour in one shrine, two of them National Treasures. Exhibition plans can change, so check before travelling.