Ancient Sacred Treasures

Five Court Robes That Should Not Have Survived

Almost nothing remains of how aristocratic women actually dressed in Kamakura-period Japan (1185–1333). Court robes were woven from silk, and silk decays, gets recut into something newer, or burns. Complete garments that came through eight centuries intact can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Five of them belong to a single shrine in Kamakura.

Those five robes, together with a set of lacquered weapons, make up the Koshinpōrui (古神宝類), literally the "ancient sacred treasures," of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the group a National Treasure on June 28, 1956. The objects are owned by the shrine, which sits in Yukinoshita in central Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, a short walk from the medieval city that the Minamoto warrior house built around it.

What survives is unusual on two counts. The textiles are rare because so little clothing of their age exists anywhere. The weapons are rare because they were never meant to be used, only offered, and so they escaped the wear that destroyed working arms of the same period.

The Robes

All five garments are uchiki (袿), the lined silk robe that formed the principal layer of a noblewoman's court dress. In the multi-layered ensemble later known as the jūnihitoe, several uchiki were worn one over another so that their hems and sleeve edges stacked into bands of graded colour. A single robe of this kind is wide and long: four of these measure roughly 167 to 172 centimetres from shoulder to hem, with sleeves about 70 centimetres deep.

Each robe carries a different woven pattern, and the names alone sketch the range. One is white, its ground filled with the small lozenge mesh called koaoi and overlaid with phoenixes in a double-cloth weave. Two are deep purple, patterned with roundels of facing cranes stacked in threes, executed in karaori, a heavy figured brocade. A fourth, in pale incense-brown, uses a twill ground with the lozenge motif known as sachibishi, here built up from cranes, pine, and flower-diamonds. The last, a smaller yellow robe, sets a "nest" roundel against a scatter of hail-like dots.

Stand in front of them and the first thing you notice is the restraint. The phoenixes are pale violet and light blue on a near-white field, not the loud gold of later centuries. The crane roundels are simplified almost to silhouette. This quietness is itself a dating clue: textile historians read the calm, large-scale motifs as the taste of the Kamakura age rather than the busier patterns that came afterward.

The Weapons

The other half of the set belongs to a warrior shrine. There is a bow finished in vermilion lacquer, a quiver of thirty arrows in black lacquer (one missing its inner shaft), two flat back-quivers, and two sword mountings. The quivers and mountings share the same decoration: a gold-flecked lacquer ground, called ikakeji, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in an apricot-leaf design. The technique, raden, sets cut shell into the lacquer so that the surface catches light from within.

These were votive objects, dedicated to the deity rather than carried into battle. Their condition reflects that. A sword that saw service rarely keeps its scabbard and fittings for seven hundred years; one preserved on an altar can. Together the robes and the arms say something about the shrine that holds them, a place founded by warriors who also kept the refinements of the imperial court close at hand.

Why It Counts as a National Treasure

There is a story attached to the robes. An Edo-period gazetteer of Sagami Province, the Shinpen Sagami-no-kuni Fudoki, lists among the shrine's sacred goods a set of layered garments said to have been offered by the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192) in honour of Empress Jingū, one of the three deities worshipped at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū. The surviving robes are thought to be those same garments.

Historians treat that pedigree as tradition, not documented fact. What is not in doubt is the age and quality of the weaving. On the evidence of their motifs and techniques, the robes are firmly placed in the Kamakura period, and the reason the designation matters comes down to a single hard truth: complete court costume of that era has survived almost nowhere else. Fragments exist, recut pieces exist, but a group of full garments preserved together, with their weapons, is close to unique. The set lets researchers see Kamakura court dress as whole objects rather than reconstruct it from scraps.

Where to See Them, and the Shrine Around Them

The treasures are deposited at the Kamakura Museum of National Treasures (Kamakura Kokuhōkan), which stands inside the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū precinct near the east entrance. The museum opened in 1928, prompted by the cultural losses of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and its concrete hall holds more than four thousand objects entrusted by temples and shrines across Kamakura.

The robes are not on permanent show. The reliable chance to see them comes once a year, when the museum mounts its special exhibition of the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū sacred treasures around the shrine's grand festival in mid-September; recent runs have stretched from early September into October. The textiles are fragile, so even then the selection on view rotates and the robes are not always all out at once. If your visit falls outside that window, the shrine's own treasure hall displays full-scale replicas year-round.

The shrine itself rewards the walk regardless. Minamoto no Yoriyoshi first enshrined the Hachiman deity at a coastal site in 1063; his descendant Minamoto no Yoritomo moved it to the present hillside in 1180 and made it the tutelary shrine of his new government in Kamakura. The vermilion main hall, reached by a broad stone stair, along with the lower Wakamiya hall and the small Maruyama Inari shrine, are designated Important Cultural Properties, and the grounds as a whole are a National Historic Site. The approach runs straight back to the sea down the Wakamiya Ōji avenue, the central axis of the old warrior capital.