Image of Fujiwara Mitsunori, Colored on Silk

A Court Noble Whose Name Is Still in Dispute

A court noble sits upright on a double layer of tatami. His black silk robe breaks into hard, angular folds, a long sword rests at his left hip, and both hands grip a flat wooden scepter held against his chest. The face is turned slightly to his right, the gaze steady. This is the hanging scroll catalogued as the Portrait Said to Be Fujiwara no Mitsuyoshi, one of three nearly identical paintings that the mountain temple Jingo-ji, northwest of Kyoto, has owned for centuries.

The three scrolls are known together as the Jingo-ji Three Portraits. Each is color on silk, each measures roughly 143 centimeters tall, and each shows a seated dignitary in full court dress. The painting discussed here is the narrowest of the three at about 111.6 centimeters across, and like the others it was painted on a single uncut width of silk rather than several panels joined together. By tradition the sitter is Fujiwara no Mitsuyoshi, a court official of the late twelfth century who served as a close attendant to the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the work as a product of the Kamakura period and lists the painter as Fujiwara no Takanobu, a noted portraitist of that era. Both points, as it turns out, are now contested by specialists. The scroll is held by Jingo-ji but is kept on long-term deposit at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno.

A National Treasure, and a Century-Long Argument

The three portraits were first protected in 1897 under Japan's early heritage law, then re-designated as National Treasures under the postwar system on June 9, 1951. The grounds for that ranking have never been in doubt: the set counts among the highest achievements of secular portraiture in medieval Japan. The faces are built up with patient layers of fine ink for the brows, lashes and hairline, and the modeling shows the absorption of Chinese Song-dynasty techniques into a native painting tradition.

What the three portraits depict, and when they were made, is another matter. None of the scrolls carries an inscription naming its sitter. The traditional identifications rest mainly on a later temple record, the Jingoji Ryakki, which describes portraits of Go-Shirakawa, Minamoto no Yoritomo, Taira no Shigemori, Fujiwara no Mitsuyoshi and others once installed at the temple.

In 1995 the art historian Yonekura Michio published a reading that overturned the conventional account. He argued that the three sitters are not the twelfth-century figures of tradition but members of the Ashikaga family of the following century: the portrait long called Yoritomo as Ashikaga Tadayoshi, the one called Shigemori as the shogun Ashikaga Takauji, and this scroll, called Mitsuyoshi, as Takauji's son and successor Ashikaga Yoshiakira. The historian Kuroda Hideo later assembled extensive documentary support for the same view, placing the paintings in the mid-fourteenth century during the turbulent Northern and Southern Courts period.

The case for the later date draws on physical evidence. Silk woven in a single width broad enough for these paintings does not appear until the late Kamakura period; earlier large portraits were pieced together from separate panels. The form of the court cap, the double-stacked tatami, and the patterning of the robes all match works of the fourteenth century rather than the twelfth. Many historians now accept the reattribution, while a number of art historians continue to argue on stylistic grounds for an earlier date. The prefix "den," meaning "said to be," that opens each official title is the heritage system's quiet acknowledgment that the names are not secure.

What to Look For in This Particular Scroll

Of the three, this is the one specialists treat as the outlier. It is thought to have been painted a little after the other two, and its handling is judged firmer and more schematic: the contour lines are drier, the soft graded shading that gives the other faces their roundness is reduced, and the figure reads as more stylized. Several scholars place it at the moment when the older portrait tradition begins to harden into the manner of the Muromachi period, which makes it a useful hinge between two eras rather than a lesser work.

Look at the sword. On this scroll the hilt has flaked away, where on the companion paintings the grip survives and reveals an archaic blade type. The robe carries a bridle-bit arabesque pattern, the same design used on the portrait called Shigemori, and the figure faces left as that one does. Under the newer reading, that visual pairing is no accident: it would link a father's successor to his line.

There is one more detail that captures how unstable the identity of this painting has always been. During the Edo period the same scroll was catalogued not as Mitsuyoshi at all but as the portrait of a different courtier, Sakuramachi Chunagon Narikata. The man in the black robe has worn several names across the centuries, and the argument over who he really is has not ended.

Where to See It, and the Temple That Owns It

A practical point trips up many visitors. The three portraits are not kept in one place. The scrolls called Yoritomo and Shigemori are on deposit at the Kyoto National Museum and travel back to Jingo-ji each spring for the temple's annual airing of its treasures, held from May 1 to 5. The painting described here, the one called Mitsuyoshi, is on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum and appears from time to time in the museum's rotating galleries of Japanese art. To stand in front of this specific scroll, the place to watch is the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, when it is on display.

Jingo-ji itself rewards the climb. The temple sits on the wooded slope of Mount Takao and traces its origins to Wake no Kiyomaro in the late eighth century; the monk Kukai lived here early in the ninth. Its holdings include a National Treasure standing Yakushi Nyorai carved from a single block of wood and an ancient bronze bell counted among the three finest in the country. From the Jizo-in hall at the back of the grounds, visitors throw small unglazed clay discs out over the Kinunkei gorge, a custom said to have begun here and at its best when the maples turn in late autumn. The temple is reached by JR bus to the Takao stop, followed by a walk of about twenty minutes up stone steps. It opens from 9:00 to 16:00, with admission of 1,000 yen.