Ancient Sacred Treasures

Ko-shinpō-rui: Sacred Arms Made for a God of War

A bow almost two meters long, cut from a single length of spindle-tree wood and coated end to end in vermilion lacquer, was never strung for combat. It was made to stand before a deity. At Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura, this bow survives alongside a set of ceremonial weapons designated together as a National Treasure under the name Ko-shinpō-rui, literally "ancient sacred treasures."

The group brings together a vermilion-lacquered bow, thirty black-lacquered arrows, two flat quivers, and two long swords. All were dedicated to Hachiman, the deity of war and protector of the Minamoto warrior house, whose presence the shrine enshrines.

The phrase shinpō describes objects offered to a kami as the god's own possessions: weapons, mirrors, garments, furnishings. Major shrines periodically renewed these regalia, and the older sets that survived the renewal came to be called ko-shinpō, the treasures of an earlier age. Few such groups of arms have come down to the present in any condition, which makes this one rare before a visitor even considers its craftsmanship.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The set was designated a National Treasure on June 28, 1956. Its value rests on three things at once: the quality of its decoration, its near-complete survival, and its place in the history of medieval Japanese metalwork and lacquer.

The quivers and sword scabbards are finished in ikakeji, a lacquer technique in which gold is laid down so densely that the surface reads as solid metal rather than ornament applied to wood. Over this gold ground runs raden, inlay cut from iridescent shell, shaped here into gyōyō or apricot-leaf motifs and Chinese-flower medallions. The Agency for Cultural Affairs ranks the group second only to the sacred treasures of the Wakamiya at Kasuga Taisha in Nara, the benchmark against which all surviving medieval offerings of this kind are measured.

The dating asks for care. Shrine tradition, recorded in the Edo-period gazetteer Shinpen Sagami Kunifudokikō, holds that Minamoto no Yoriyoshi, the warrior who first enshrined Hachiman here, obtained sacred treasures from Iwashimizu Hachimangū near Kyoto and offered them at his new shrine. On stylistic grounds, specialists place the two swords and two quivers in the Kamakura period, while the bow and arrows may be older, possibly reaching back to the Heian era. The Kamakura Museum of National Treasures notes that an Edo-period catalogue of antiquities described the two swords as weapons fit for a warrior of the highest rank, and the museum associates them with Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura shogunate. These are traditions worth knowing rather than settled fact; the makers are unrecorded and the exact dates remain open.

What to Look For

The two long swords are tachi, the curved blade a mounted warrior wore slung edge-down from the waist, a form that predates the later katana carried edge-up through the sash. Their scabbards carry the same gold ground and shell apricot-leaf pattern as the quivers, and the hilts are covered in silver-dusted rayskin. One blade shows a fine wood-grain forging pattern when light falls along it. The pair is close but not identical, and one of the two has lost its guard, a small absence that records how these objects passed through eight centuries.

The quivers are hira-yanagui, a flat type held at the hip, their outer boards bright with gold and shell while the interior is plain black lacquer, the contrast deliberate. The bow, near 195 centimeters, keeps gilt-bronze nocks at each end and a binding of rattan below the grip.

Look closely at the arrows. Thirty shafts survive, finished in black lacquer, their heads cast in gilt bronze in several forms: the bulb-shaped whistling head that sang as it flew, the forked head, the slender point. A few nocks are set with lapis lazuli and pale stone. The feathering is a later replacement, a detail the conservators have never hidden. These arrows carry a second life as well: they are regarded as the origin of the hamaya, the demon-dispelling arrow that Japanese shrines still hand out at New Year.

Visiting and Nearby

A visitor cannot simply walk up to these objects on any day. For conservation and security, the shrine's own museum displays high-quality reproductions for most of the year. The originals are brought out for the public at the Kamakura Museum of National Treasures (Kamakura Kokuhōkan), which stands inside the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū precincts, during a special exhibition of the shrine's sacred treasures held each autumn around the grand festival, Reitaisai, in mid-September. Anyone hoping to see the real arms should time a visit to that window and check the museum's schedule in advance.

The shrine itself rewards a slow approach. The long raised path called Dankazura leads up from the town toward the vermilion gate, and the wide stone steps climb to the upper hall above the precinct. Kamakura packs much else within a short ride: the great bronze Buddha at Kōtoku-in, the Zen monastery of Kenchō-ji, and quiet temple gardens that turn in the seasons. A single day built around the shrine, the national-treasure museum, and one or two temples makes a full and unhurried visit.