Ten Benefits, Light Color on Paper (by Ike Taiga)

Juben-zu: Ten Conveniences by Ike no Taiga

Each leaf of this album measures roughly 18 centimeters square, small enough to rest on an open palm. Across ten of these pages, painted in ink and light color in 1771, the literati master Ike no Taiga set down ten "conveniences" of life in a mountain villa: fishing from the veranda, drawing water from a spring, tending a vegetable garden, watching over the fields. The album is known as Juben-zu, the Ten Conveniences, and it ranks among the most celebrated paintings of Japan's Edo period.

The Japanese government designated it an Important Cultural Property on April 30, 1935, and elevated it to National Treasure status on June 9, 1951. Its official designation reads Shihon Tansai Juben-zu, meaning "Ten Conveniences, light color on paper, by Ike no Taiga." Today it belongs to the Kawabata Yasunari Memorial Foundation in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, the body that administers the estate of Japan's first Nobel laureate in literature.

A Chinese Poem, Two Japanese Masters

The album illustrates verses by Li Yu (1611-1680), a dramatist and essayist active in China during the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. When acquaintances suggested that his country villa must be inconvenient, Li Yu answered with a sequence of poems listing the conveniences and pleasures of rural life. Edo-period Japanese literati admired his writings, and around 1771 a wealthy merchant named Shimozato Gakkai (1742-1790), from the post town of Narumi in Owari Province (now part of Nagoya), commissioned a painted response to the poems.

Gakkai divided the project between the two leading literati painters of the day. Ike no Taiga, then 49, took the ten "conveniences." Yosa Buson, then 56 and equally renowned as a haiku poet, painted a companion album of ten "pleasures," the Jugi-zu, depicting the changing moods of the villa through seasons and weather. The two men worked in Kyoto at the same time yet are not thought to have been close associates, which makes this paired commission a rare meeting of rivals on equal ground. Both albums survive together and were designated National Treasures on the same day in 1951. As a pair they are commonly called the Juben Jugi-zu.

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, one leaf carries a dated inscription from the eighth month of Meiwa 8, corresponding to 1771 in the Western calendar.

What Makes the Album a National Treasure

Taiga's ten leaves portray the practical blessings of seclusion, each titled with a single activity. Cho-ben shows the ease of angling without leaving home. Ko-ben depicts plowing, Kyu-ben the drawing of water, Kantaku-ben laundry at the stream, Kan'en-ben the watering of a garden. Gin-ben celebrates the freedom to recite poetry, Kano-ben the supervision of farm work, Sho-ben the gathering of firewood, Boya-ben the security of the house at night, and Cho-ben (written with a different character) the view from the windows.

The brushwork rewards close looking. Taiga builds his scenery from short, vibrating strokes and dots, then floats thin washes of pale color over them. Figures the size of a fingernail bend over hoes or lean from verandas with rods in hand, rendered in a few flicks of the brush yet unmistakably alive. The intimacy of the format matters: these are not paintings for a wall but for the hand, meant to be turned page by page like a book, one scene at a time.

Art historians regard the paired albums as a summit of nanga, the Japanese school of painting inspired by Chinese literati models. Seeing Taiga's warmth and openness alongside Buson's quieter, more atmospheric leaves lets a viewer compare two great sensibilities responding to a single text.

Kawabata Yasunari and the Album

The albums remained with the Shimozato family until after the Second World War. The novelist Kawabata Yasunari, author of Snow Country and winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, acquired them in the postwar years. He is said to have diverted money set aside for buying a house toward the purchase, an anecdote often cited as proof of his devotion to art. His eye proved sound: the albums entered his collection before their National Treasure designation in 1951, as did another of his acquisitions, Uragami Gyokudo's Frozen Clouds Sifting Powdery Snow.

Kawabata wrote about individual leaves of the albums in short essays that accompanied editions of his collected works, and he kept the paintings near him at his home in the Hase district of Kamakura. After his death in 1972, his collection passed to the memorial foundation that bears his name.

How and Where to See It

The Kawabata Yasunari Memorial Foundation maintains no exhibition hall of its own, so the album can only be seen when it travels. It is lent to museum exhibitions with some regularity, reportedly once or twice in a typical year, and National Treasure paintings on paper are shown only for limited periods with pages rotated during a run. Recent venues include the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, where the paired albums appeared in a national treasures exhibition in 2025, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, which featured Taiga in 2024. Checking museum schedules for exhibitions on Taiga, Buson, literati painting, or the Kawabata collection is the surest way to catch it.

Travelers drawn to the Kawabata connection can visit the Hase neighborhood of Kamakura, about an hour from Tokyo. The writer's former residence stands beside Amanawa Shinmei Shrine and remains private, though its garden opens to small groups on rare occasions. Hase-dera temple, with its eleven-headed Kannon statue and hydrangea-covered slopes, and the Great Buddha of Kotoku-in are both within a ten-minute walk, and the Enoden tram line connects Hase Station to Kamakura's central sights.