Gonijodenki (one Volume of Handwritten Manuscript/twenty

A Heian Regent's Diary, Written to Within Days of His Death

In the second month of 1093, the court assembled to raise Imperial Princess Atsuko to the rank of empress to Emperor Horikawa. The senior minister who managed the ceremony and set it down in writing was Fujiwara no Moromichi. The one scroll that survives in his own hand records exactly that occasion, brushed in a measured formal script across faintly ruled lines.

That scroll is the core of the Gonijō-dono ki, the diary of Fujiwara no Moromichi (1062–1099). Moromichi rose to kampaku, chief regent and head of the Fujiwara clan, during the reign of Emperor Horikawa, and he was a great-grandson of Fujiwara no Michinaga, the dominant figure of the earlier Heian court. He kept his journal from 1083, the year he became Minister of the Center at twenty-two, until his death at thirty-eight in 1099. Entries run to within eleven days of the end, a detail suggesting that even Moromichi did not see it coming.

Thirty Volumes, One in the Author's Own Brush

What the Agency for Cultural Affairs designates is a set of thirty scrolls. Only one is the autograph: the record of Princess Atsuko's elevation in 1093. The remaining twenty-nine are old transcripts, copied in 1151 by the household officials of Moromichi's grandson, Fujiwara no Yorinaga. The colophons attached to the copies state as much, which is how scholars can date and trace them so precisely.

The diary itself once ran far longer. Moromichi wrote across seventeen years, from his appointment as a young minister to his final illness, but roughly five years of entries have been lost. The text that remains is known under several names that all point to the same man: Gonijō Kampaku-ki, Moromichi-ki, and Moromichi Kō-ki among them. The author signed nothing so grand; the titles came from later readers who valued what he had recorded.

Diary-keeping ran in this family. Yōmei Bunko, where these scrolls are held today, also keeps the Midō Kampaku-ki, the autograph diary of Michinaga himself, inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Read side by side, the two journals trace a single bloodline across roughly a century of court life.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The Gonijō-dono ki was designated a National Treasure on 29 March 1952, in the category of ancient documents. Its value rests on two pillars that rarely meet in one object.

The first is the writing's authority. A Heian regent recorded court ritual not as observation but as instruction, noting who stood where, what was worn, and which precedents governed each act. Because the ceremonies of the imperial court were repeated by reference to earlier ones, a regent's diary became a working manual for the next generation. Moromichi's pages preserve that machinery in granular detail, which is why his grandson's house took the trouble to copy them in full.

The second is the diary's reach beyond the palace. The volume covering 1096 describes the damage along the coast of Suruga Province after the Eichō earthquake, recording that a wave swept away more than four hundred dwellings. Entries like this turn a private journal into primary evidence for natural disasters, regional administration, and daily aristocratic life. The surviving autograph and the twelfth-century transcripts together carry that testimony forward in a form historians can trust.

What to Look For

The contrast between the two kinds of scroll repays attention. The single autograph leaf carries the immediacy of a hand at work, with the slight irregularities that come from writing in real time. The transcripts, ruled and copied in clean clerical script, show how a great house preserved its records as deliberate acts of memory rather than chance survivals.

The man behind the brush is worth knowing too. Moromichi had a reputation for learning, described in one chronicle as a reader who never tired of study. He was also unbending in office. In 1095 he ordered armed force used against the warrior-monks of Enryaku-ji and the Hiyoshi shrine over disputed estates; monks died in the clash, and the temple protested fiercely. When he fell ill and died a few years later, some at court read the early death as a curse. The diary, written by his own hand through years of worsening health, gives the human counterweight to that legend.

How to See It

Yōmei Bunko is not a museum. It is the archive of the Konoe family, the leading house among the five regent lineages of the old aristocracy, and it preserves roughly one hundred thousand items spanning more than a thousand years. The foundation was established in 1938 by Konoe Fumimaro, then prime minister and head of the family, on a quiet site in the Utano district of western Kyoto. Individual visits are not accepted; access is limited to scholars and to pre-arranged groups during restricted seasons.

For most visitors, the practical route is a special exhibition. The diary and other Konoe treasures travel periodically to major museums, including past showings of the family's National Treasures at the Kyushu National Museum and in the long-running Yōmei Bunko series at the Museum of Kyoto. Checking the current schedules of the national museums in Kyoto, Nara, and Kyushu is the surest way to catch a scroll on display.

The setting itself rewards a visit. Yōmei Bunko sits in the temple district of western Kyoto, a short distance from Ninna-ji and Ryōan-ji, both World Heritage sites, with the rock garden of Ryōan-ji and the gilded pavilion of Kinkaku-ji within easy reach. A day spent among these places gives a fuller sense of the courtly world the diary describes than any single object could.