Yasaka Shrine Documents (2,205 Documents)

2,205 Documents, an Important Cultural Property since 1990

Yasaka Shrine Documents (2,205 Documents) (八坂神社文書, Yasaka Jinja Monjo) are old documents owned by Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 June 1990. They span the Heian to the Edo period.

A listing in 1990 is among the more recent encountered here, and the record is correspondingly full.

The shrine's main hall and the twenty-nine structures of its precinct have already been covered. Buildings and documents are recorded as separate properties.

The Title Counts One Way, the Quantity Field Another

What first catches the eye is a disagreement between two counts.

The title gives 2,205 documents. The quantity field gives 89 scrolls, 40 volumes, 1 folded book and 1 sheet.

A document is one piece of writing, and there are 2,205 of them. What the quantity field lists is the form in which they are kept: scrolls, bound volumes, a folded book, a loose sheet.

Individual documents have come down pasted end to end onto scrolls, or gathered into bound volumes. The title counts the contents; the quantity field counts the containers.

The Tetsugen printing blocks were counted to the single block, 48,275 of them. Where many identical things survive as they are, and where things have been gathered into new forms, the counting changes.

Two Lines of Descent Joined

This body of documents was not originally one collection.

The Agency records that they came down at Hojuin, the former administrative office of the Gion shrine, and consist of documents that passed into the shrine's ownership from the Meiji era, in nine scrolls, together with documents formerly held by the Takeuchi family, once the shrine's administrators.

The first group, the shrine documents, comprises ninety-five pieces, centred on an edict of the Council of State dated the twentieth day of the second month of 1070 and on documents of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods.

The second group, the Takeuchi documents, comprises more than two thousand one hundred pieces, running from 1172 to the Edo period.

Ninety-five and more than two thousand one hundred together make 2,205. Two groups with different histories of ownership are designated as one property.

A Founding Document, and Names on the Slips

Individual documents are described as well.

Of the 1070 edict the Agency writes that it sets out the four boundaries of the Gion shrine and confirms afresh its possession of them, and may be called the shrine's founding document.

Of the directives issued under Ashikaga Takauji's own mark and of shogunal directives generally, it writes that the names of the scribes and of the officials in charge appear on attached slips, so that these documents attract attention in the study of early Muromachi administrative writing.

The names appear not on the sheet itself but on slips attached to it. Small pieces of paper stuck to a document record who wrote it and who handled it.

Of the Takeuchi documents, the core concerns four estates of the Gion shrine, among them holdings in Tanba and Bingo. Also listed are a genealogy of the twelve mounted halberd bearers, receipts for the funds carried on horseback at the Gion festival, papers showing the activity of the shrine's outcaste servants, and material on the trade guilds attached to it.

Consulting Them

Yasaka Shrine, in Kyoto Prefecture, owns the documents. They are a shrine holding, not kept on permanent display.

Work on paper is vulnerable to light, so periods on view are limited.

With 2,205 documents it is hard to imagine all being viewable at once, and since they are gathered into scrolls and volumes, only part of any one can be opened.

Consultation and study follow procedures the shrine sets. Check before travelling.