Imperial Letters of Emperor Go Kashiwabara and Emperor Go

An Imperial Handscroll of Poems from a Court in Crisis

A single handscroll kept at Manshuin, an imperial temple in the wooded hills of northeastern Kyoto, carries draft poems by two emperors who reigned through one of the most turbulent stretches of Japanese history. Catalogued by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as the Imperial Autograph of Emperor Go-Kashiwabara: Poem Drafts of Emperors Go-Tsuchimikado and Go-Kashiwabara (後柏原天皇宸翰後土御門後柏原両天皇御詠草), it was written in the hand of Emperor Go-Kashiwabara (1464–1526) and gathers waka composed by him and by his father, Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado (reigned 1464–1500).

The scroll belongs to the calligraphy and classical-texts category of designated property. Its makers ruled during the Warring States era, when the capital lay scarred by the Ōnin War and the imperial treasury had all but emptied. Go-Tsuchimikado's funeral could not be held for forty-three days after his death because the court could not pay for it, and his son waited some twenty-one years before he could afford his own enthronement ceremony. That a fragile paper roll of personal poetry survived these decades, in the hand of a reigning sovereign, is part of what gives it its weight.

A handscroll like this is read from right to left, unrolled span by span across the lap or a low table. The brush moves vertically; the poems sit in columns, each one a fixed thirty-one syllables of classical waka. Reading it is a slow, private act, closer to turning the pages of a notebook than to viewing a painting.

Why It Matters: An Emperor's Brush and a Master's Marks

In Japan, calligraphy written by an emperor's own hand carries a special name, shinkan (宸翰), and a value beyond the words it records. The brushwork is treated as a direct trace of the sovereign, and surviving imperial autographs from the medieval centuries are scarce. Go-Kashiwabara was admired as a calligrapher in his own right. His manner descended from the Shōren-in tradition founded by the priest-prince Son'en, and later writers came to call his style the Go-Kashiwabara-in school. The line swells and thins as the brush travels, a quality connoisseurs prize in his work.

The poems themselves grew out of a living practice. Composing waka was not a private hobby at the late-medieval court but a discipline studied under recognised masters. Go-Kashiwabara learned the art from his father and from the courtier-scholar Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537), and he left a personal anthology titled the Hakugyokushū. Draft poems such as these were often written out to be submitted for criticism, the way a student today might hand in an essay for correction.

That critical step is recorded on the scroll. Its catalogue note specifies marks by Asukai Eiga (飛鳥井栄雅, 1417–1490), the lay name of Asukai Masachika, eighth head of a family that had served for generations as hereditary masters of both waka and kemari, the courtly kickball game. Eiga taught poetry to the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimasa and Yoshihisa and stood at the centre of the poetic world of his day; he also founded a school of calligraphy named after him. A master reading a pupil's poems would place an approving dot, called a ten or gatten, beside the verses he judged successful, sometimes adding a corrected word in small script in the margin. Those marks turn the scroll into a record of two emperors at work and, just as much, of how their poems were weighed and refined.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the work an Important Cultural Property on 24 May 1916. It is the kind of object that historians of literature and calligraphy return to precisely because it captures a process, not just a finished poem.

Looking Closely: What the Scroll Reveals

Set aside the imperial titles for a moment and the scroll reads as something quietly human: a young prince and his father working at their poems, a respected teacher leaning over the page to mark what worked. The themes follow the conventions of court verse, often the seasons and the natural world. A poem on a waterfall, a recurring subject in Go-Kashiwabara's surviving drafts, plays the rush of falling water against the stillness of pine and rock.

Go-Kashiwabara channelled the same brush into devotion. During a smallpox epidemic in 1525, he copied out the Heart Sutra by hand and sent it to the temples of Enryaku-ji and Ninna-ji, praying for his suffering people. He also revived a court New Year poetry gathering in 1501 that is regarded as the direct ancestor of the Utakai Hajime, the imperial poetry reading still held every January. Seen against that life, the poem drafts are one thread in a sustained effort to keep court culture alive when almost everything else was failing.

One practical point for travellers: this is a paper handscroll several centuries old, and it is not on permanent public display. Manshuin's most celebrated treasures, including its National Treasure painting of the Yellow Fudō and its National Treasure manuscript of the Kokin Wakashū, are held in trust at the Kyoto National Museum, and delicate documents of this kind appear only in occasional special exhibitions. The reward of a visit lies elsewhere, in the temple that has guarded such works for centuries.

Visiting Manshuin and the Surrounding Area

Manshuin sits in Ichijōji, in the Sakyō ward of Kyoto, below the western slope of Mount Hiei and a short distance from the Shugakuin Imperial Villa. It is one of the five great Tendai monzeki temples, the rank reserved for temples headed by abbots of imperial or aristocratic birth. The five white stripes running along the earthen wall beside the closed Imperial Messenger's Gate signal that status; visitors enter through a separate side gate.

The temple's link to the imperial family explains why such poems came to rest here. Around 1495 the priest-prince Jiun, an adopted son of Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado, became abbot, and from then on members of the imperial house led the temple. Its present buildings date from 1656, when the cultured priest-prince Ryōshō moved Manshuin to its current site and laid out the rooms and garden. Ryōshō was a son of Prince Toshihito, who built the Katsura Imperial Villa, and the shared design sensibility has earned Manshuin the nickname "the little Katsura."

The Ōshoin and Kōshoin halls, both Important Cultural Properties, repay slow attention: pull-handles shaped like gourds and fans, a ranma transom cut with a moon-and-swastika motif, the inventive Manshuin staggered shelves assembled from some ten kinds of wood, and a stone water basin carved with an owl on the veranda's edge. Beyond them spreads a dry landscape garden of raked white gravel, with an "island" crane pine said to be four centuries old. The maples here make Manshuin one of Kyoto's quieter spots for autumn colour, sometimes lit after dark in November. Photography is generally limited to the garden, taken from the veranda.

To reach the temple, take a city bus to the Ichijōji-Shimizuchō stop, about a twenty-minute uphill walk away, or the Eizan Railway to Ichijōji Station, a little farther on foot. The approach is a gentle climb. Opening hours and admission can change with the season and special viewings, so confirm current details on the temple's official website before you go.