Tsuketari

What tsuketari means

Tsuketari is the practice of designating an item alongside a cultural property because the two belong together, so that the associated object falls within the same designation. The word is read tsuketari and the arrangement is also called tsuketari designation.

In the National Cultural Properties Database, records for designated architecture carry a field for it, and where something has been added the entry gives both its name and its own quantity. The main hall of Takasu Shrine in Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property on 25 September 2023, is a cypress-bark-roofed shrine building recorded as one structure, with six ridge tablets designated as tsuketari. Ridge tablets are wooden boards recording the date of construction or repair and the people involved, which is what makes them worth keeping with the building.

What gets added this way is material that would not stand alone as a designation but without which the main object is harder to understand. Separating the two would cost both of them meaning, so they are protected as one case.

Many designations have nothing attached. Where the database field reads none, the designation covers the main object only.

Points to watch when writing

First, do not fold the attached quantity into the main one. At Takasu Shrine the building is recorded as one structure and the tablets as six, kept apart in the record. A basic information table should carry the figure for the property itself, not a combined total.

Second, tsuketari is not the same as the fusho, the supplementary sheet attached to a certificate of designation. Under the rules governing those certificates, the sheet carries the breakdown of the Insū where a quantity has sub-items, along with the structure and form of a building, and it counts as part of the certificate. That is a document, not an object brought within the designation.

Third, this belongs to the designation system alone. Records for a Registered Tangible Cultural Property have no such field, because registration works differently. Applying the term to a registered building misdescribes which system is at work.