Black Lacquer Desk

A Heian-Period Desk in Black Lacquer

Among the designated treasures of Kōzan-ji, a mountain temple in the wooded hills northwest of Kyoto, is a single piece of furniture catalogued under one of the plainest names in the national register: Kokushitsu tsukue, a black-lacquered desk. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as one item, a craft work of the Heian period (794–1185), and adds little more. It carries no maker's name, no inscribed date, no recorded measurements in the public listing. What survives is the object itself and the temple that has kept it.

That reticence is part of the interest. Wooden furnishings rarely outlast the centuries. They are used until they wear out, then replaced. A low desk that has come down from the Heian age, its surface still sheathed in kuro-urushi, the deep, near-black lacquer drawn from the sap of the Asian lacquer tree and built up in thin polished coats, belongs to a small group of survivors from a time when most such things have vanished.

Lacquer was the protective and decorative finish of choice for fine wooden objects in early Japan. Applied layer by layer and burnished between coats, it sealed the grain, resisted moisture, and gave a hard, lustrous skin that aged slowly. A desk treated this way was not ordinary household stock. In a temple, a low desk of this type would have held rolled sutras for reading and copying, or served a monk at his writing. The public record does not fix this particular desk to a single use, and it is best described by what it is: a Heian craftsman's desk, finished in black lacquer, preserved at a temple that became one of medieval Japan's great centers of study.

The Temple That Kept It

Kōzan-ji sits in Toganō, the innermost of the three valleys of Takao, Makinoo, and Toganō, long known together as the Sanbi, the "Three Tails," celebrated for autumn color. A temple of some kind stood here from the eighth century, but the place owes its identity to the monk Myōe (1173–1232). In 1206 the retired emperor Go-Toba granted Myōe the land, and he refounded it as a center for the revival of Kegon, the Flower Garland school of Buddhism. The temple's name comes from a line in the Flower Garland Sutra describing the sun's first light striking the highest peak.

Myōe was a scholar and a keeper of records. He wrote down his dreams for decades, and he gathered and copied texts on a scale that left Kōzan-ji with one of the richest medieval collections of Buddhist scripture and documents in the country, some twelve thousand items in all, surveyed and catalogued in full only in the twentieth century. A temple built around reading and writing is exactly the kind of place where a Heian writing desk might be cared for rather than discarded. The desk predates Myōe's refounding by at least a generation, a Heian object that outlived its own century inside a community that valued the written word.

Why It Is Designated, and What That Means

The black-lacquered desk was named an Important Cultural Property on June 15, 1967, under designation number 02223. For visitors from abroad, the tier matters. Japan protects its movable heritage in a graded system. At the top stand National Treasures (kokuhō), the small number of works judged supreme of their kind. Below them, and far more numerous, are Important Cultural Properties (jūyō bunkazai), objects of high historical or artistic value selected for national protection. Kōzan-ji holds examples of both; the desk belongs to the second rank.

The value of such a piece lies less in spectacle than in rarity. Heian craftwork in lacquer is studied closely for what it reveals about technique and form before the great flowering of decorative maki-e in the medieval centuries. A plain lacquered desk, with no gold ornament to draw the eye, is valued precisely as a record of how everyday and liturgical furniture was made and finished. The desk keeps company at Kōzan-ji with three other designated craft objects, all richer in decoration: a mother-of-pearl and maki-e reliquary shrine shaped like a moon disc, a painted wooden sutra-wheel container, and a lacquer reliquary worked with wheel-and-thunderbolt motifs. The desk is the quiet member of that group.

What You Can Actually See

A word of candor: you will not see the desk on a casual visit. Like most of Kōzan-ji's craft treasures, it is not on regular public display, and several of the temple's most famous works are held on deposit at the national museums in Tokyo and Kyoto. Planning a trip around the desk itself would end in disappointment. Planning one around the temple that preserves it will not.

The building to make for is Sekisui-in, the temple's National Treasure hall and the one structure surviving from Myōe's own day. Its open veranda looks out over the Kiyotaki valley, and from the floorboards inside, a small carved figure of the boy-pilgrim Sudhana, known in Japanese as Zenzai-dōji, the seeker who travels through the Flower Garland Sutra in search of wisdom, gazes off to one side. Here too you can study faithful reproductions of the temple's celebrated paintings: the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, the frolicking-animal scrolls often called Japan's earliest comic art, and the portrait of Myōe meditating in the fork of a pine on the hillside above. Photography is not permitted inside Sekisui-in.

Outside, the grounds reward an unhurried walk. A slope above the precinct holds what the temple keeps as Japan's oldest tea garden, planted, by tradition, from seeds the monk Eisai brought back from China and gave to Myōe. The diamond-paved approach, the steps up to the Kondō and the Kaisandō, and the maples that turn early here are the real reasons to climb the valley.

Around Toganō

The Three Tails make an easy sequence for one day. Below Kōzan-ji lies Saimyō-ji in Makinoo, and beyond it Jingo-ji at Takao, a steep climb to a mountaintop temple with sweeping views and a famous spot for tossing clay discs into the gorge for good fortune. The whole stretch follows the Kiyotaki River, and the foliage season, which arrives a little earlier here than in central Kyoto, draws steady crowds through November. Morning visits are the calmest.

Kōzan-ji stands at 〒616-8295, 8 Umegahata Toganō-chō, Ukyō-ku, Kyoto. The simplest approach is the JR Bus from Kyoto Station bound for Takao and Keihoku, a ride of about an hour to the Toganoo stop, with the temple a short walk away. The grounds are open from 8:30 to 17:00.