Jokomyoji Temple Site Map

One Hanging Sheet, an Important Cultural Property since 2005

Jokomyoji Temple Site Map (浄光明寺敷地絵図, Jokomyoji Shikichi Ezu) is a Nanbokucho-period document owned by Jokomyoji in Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture, listed as an Important Cultural Property on 9 June 2005. The listing is as an Important Cultural Property, not a National Treasure.

The quantity is one hanging sheet. Properties covered here have been counted in buildings, blades, mirrors, figurines, sheets of map and pieces; this measure word, used for scrolls and pictures meant to be hung, appears for the first time.

The Agency records that the map shows the buildings within the temple precinct, the surrounding landscape and the house plots. This site's record leaves the address field empty.

No Date Is Written, Yet It Is Narrowed to Two Years

When it was made is bracketed from two directions.

The Agency notes first that the map carries no date.

It then observes that since the house plots appear as former sites, the map must postdate the fall of the Kamakura shogunate on the twenty-second day of the fifth month of 1333. That fixes the earlier limit.

It adds that the man whose monogram appears on the map left Kamakura in the twelfth month of 1335. The period he spent there fixes the later limit.

The conclusion follows: the map was made within those two years.

The Kuwanomidera main hall was dated across a span from 1333 to 1392 and the Kumatori hall from 1275 to 1332. The nine-storied pagoda carried a carved date to the day. Here, with no date written at all, two conditions narrow it to two years.

North Is Not at the Top

The orientation of the map was settled by something other than convention.

The four corners carry the directions, with north at the upper right, east at the lower right and south at the lower left.

The Agency states plainly that this differs from the usual practice of placing north at the top, and then gives the reason.

Because the map was made to show the temple's landholdings, the Buddha hall was drawn facing the viewer, and the actual geographical directions were marked accordingly.

With the Kubiki district map, neither dimensions nor description could be read from the record, which says nothing of the map's content.

Here the purpose of the map determined even which way it faces. Function has settled form.

Damage and an Illegible Character Are Written into the Record

What cannot be read is recorded as such.

An inked title runs across the centre of the map, and the record marks one character within it as illegible.

Of the directions at the corners, the record notes that the upper left, where west would stand, is damaged. One of the four is lost.

With the nine-storied pagoda, the structural field recorded that the finial was missing. That concerns part of an object.

Here two things are recorded: a character that cannot be read, and paper that has torn.

The map is made of four sheets of mulberry paper pasted together, so the damage falls within one of them.

Seeing It

The temple owns the map. The precinct of the same temple, together with a poet's grave within it, was listed as a historic site in 1927.

At the former Shuseikan machinery factory, one piece of ground carried listings as a structure and as a historic site. Here the temple's map is an Important Cultural Property and the temple's precinct a historic site.

What is drawn is described closely. At the centre stands a Buddha hall of five bays with a skirt roof, raised on a platform, along with other buildings.

Beyond the precinct appear two temples then in ruins, and several plots marked as former sites, among them that of the last regent of the Kamakura shogunate.

Each such plot carries a note in red requesting it, which the Agency reads as the temple asking that these sites be added to its holdings when landholdings were confirmed after the shogunate fell. Seven monograms are set on the map. It is a temple holding, not kept on permanent display. Check before travelling.