Two Poems Written on a Kaishi by Fujiwara Hideyoshi ((June,

A Manuscript Dated to a Single Summer Day in 1201

On the last day of the sixth lunar month in the first year of Kennin — a summer day in 1201 by the Western calendar — a young member of Retired Emperor Go-Toba's Northern Guard — by traditional reckoning eighteen years old — sat down at a poetry gathering and brushed two short waka onto a folded sheet of paper. He signed the heading with the date. That sheet, mounted today as a single hanging scroll, survives as the Two-Poem Kaishi by Fujiwara no Hidetō (also read Hideyoshi), an Important Cultural Property kept in Kyoto Prefecture.

The young man's name would later resound through the closing chapters of the Heian-Kamakura transition: warrior, poet, eventually one of the imperial commanders defeated at the Jōkyū War of 1221 who took Buddhist vows under the name Nyogan. But in midsummer 1201, none of that had happened yet. He was about to be appointed, the very next month, as the youngest member of Go-Toba's newly established Bureau of Poetry. This scroll captures the moment just before that threshold.

Two Summer Topics: Purification and Mountain Coolness

The two assigned topics inscribed on the kaishi are Minazuki-no-harae (六月秡 — the Great Purification at the end of the sixth lunar month) and Sanka no fūryō (山家風涼 — the cool breeze at a mountain dwelling). Both are seasonal topics of summer that belong to the standard repertoire of poetic themes for the season's close.

The first carries deep ritual meaning. Even today, on the last day of June, Shintō shrines across Japan perform the nagoshi no harae, the half-year purification rite in which worshippers pass through a ring of woven reeds to cast off the accumulated impurities of the past six months. The reciting of the phrase "those who perform purification on this midsummer day will lengthen their lives by a thousand years" has been part of the ceremony since the classical period. For a poet at a midsummer gathering, the topic asked for something far more refined than ritual description — it asked for the suggestion of cleansing, of currents and white streamers flowing over a clear riverbed, of a body and a year renewed.

The second topic, the cool of a mountain home, asked for the opposite of the imperial capital's stagnant summer air. The mountain hut, the wind through pines, sleeves blown by an unexpected coolness — these are the standard images. Both topics belonged to a vocabulary that the New Kokin Wakashū generation was actively refining: the suggestion of seasonal sensation rather than its declaration.

Why the Manuscript Matters

A kaishi (literally "pocket paper") was paper folded and carried inside the breast of one's robe, drawn out at poetry gatherings and inscribed on the spot with the poet's contribution. Once written, the paper was submitted to the host. Surviving kaishi from this period are precious because they preserve poems in the exact hand of their composers — written under the social pressure of a gathering, on a precisely dateable occasion, signed and dated by the poet himself.

The form known as the two-poem kaishi (nishu kaishi) responded to gatherings where each participant was given two topics rather than one. The format was still being standardized in the years around 1200. This kaishi is significant for several reasons. First, the date inscribed on the heading — the last day of the sixth month, Kennin 1 — is not deduced from style alone but written in the poet's own hand. That precision makes the scroll a reference work for the early Kamakura calligraphic style. Second, it is the work of Fujiwara no Hidetō one month before his appointment to the Bureau of Poetry, almost a documentary record of his arrival at the level of recognized court poets. Third, the kaishi belongs to the dense web of waka kaishi produced around Retired Emperor Go-Toba — a web that includes the famous Kumano Kaishi composed during his pilgrimages, and the various kaishi by Fujiwara no Teika, Ietaka, Masatsune, and Jakuren that scholars use to chart the calligraphic culture of the New Kokin era.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the scroll an Important Cultural Property in March 1954, registering it under the Books and Classics category. The work is owned by Panasonic Holdings Corporation.

The Poet: Warrior, Courtier, Hermit

Fujiwara no Hidetō was born in 1184 — the year the Genpei War was in full violence — to Fujiwara no Hidemune, a man of warrior lineage who had been adopted into the northern Fujiwara line. He served first in the household of Minister Minamoto no Michichika before being summoned at age sixteen to Go-Toba's Northern Guard, the corps of warrior-courtiers who watched over the retired emperor's palace.

His career then moved on two tracks at once. As a warrior he rose through the offices of Saemon-no-jō, Kebiishi-no-taifu-no-jō, and eventually the governorship of Dewa Province. As a poet he attracted the personal favor of Go-Toba and was incorporated into the inner circle of the imperial poetry programme. The Bureau of Poetry that Go-Toba revived in the seventh month of 1201 brought together fourteen of the era's most accomplished poets — figures such as Fujiwara no Teika, Ietaka, Jakuren, and Masatsune — to compile what would become the eighth imperial waka anthology, the Shinkokin Wakashū. Hidetō, just turning eighteen, was the youngest. Roughly seventy-nine of his poems entered the imperial anthologies in the centuries that followed. He is counted among the New Thirty-Six Immortal Poets.

The Jōkyū War of 1221 ended this trajectory abruptly. Go-Toba's bid to recover political authority from the Kamakura shogunate failed; the retired emperor was exiled to the Oki Islands, and Hidetō, who had been one of the imperial commanders, was banished to Kumano, where he took the tonsure and adopted the religious name Nyogan. He continued composing for the rest of his life and made the long journey westward in 1232 in the hope of reaching his exiled lord. He died in 1240, aged fifty-seven.

Reading the Scroll

The scroll is mounted as a single hanging in the format developed for displaying kaishi as treasured calligraphy after their original ceremonial life had ended. Reading from right to left, the heading carries the year and date, then the two topics in order. Below each topic the poem follows in the lineation customary to the form. The hand is that of a young man trained in the calligraphic conventions of his time — the Hosshōji school of brushwork, descending from the great twelfth-century courtier-calligrapher Fujiwara no Tadamichi, dominated the brush of nearly every poet in the Go-Toba circle, and Hidetō's writing belongs to that lineage.

For a viewer who cannot read the cursive script, the scroll still rewards attention. The shape of a kaishi is a small landscape — heading at the top right, the title written slightly inset, the poem stepping down in measured lines, white space around each phrase doing as much work as the ink. The form is intended for a single sustained look. The poems themselves are short enough to be heard in a breath, and the surrounding silence on the paper is part of what was being composed.

Where to Encounter This World

The kaishi itself is held in a private corporate collection and is not on regular public display, though it may appear in special exhibitions. Visitors who want to encounter the same artistic and ritual world in which it was made have several substantial options in Kyoto and nearby.

The Kyoto National Museum in the Higashiyama district holds and displays related waka kaishi from the early Kamakura period, including pieces by other members of the Bureau of Poetry. Its standing collection of calligraphy rotates, and the curators frequently feature New Kokin–era manuscripts when their preservation schedules allow.

For the ritual side of the kaishi's first topic — the end-of-month purification — the shrines of Kamigamo and Shimogamo still perform the nagoshi no harae at the end of June each year. Visitors can pass through the woven reed ring set up on the shrine approach, follow the half-year cleansing ceremony with its slow procession, and watch katashiro paper figures float away on the Mitarashi stream at Shimogamo. The reed ring is generally raised in mid- to late June and remains in place through the ceremony.

For the historical connection to Retired Emperor Go-Toba — the patron whose poetry circle gave this kaishi its setting — the Minase Shrine south of Kyoto, near Yamazaki, was built on the site of Go-Toba's beloved Minase detached palace, where many of his poetry gatherings took place. The shrine preserves several items associated with him and offers a quieter alternative to the central Kyoto sites.