Black Lacquered Chest with Plain Pattern (lid Missing)

A Crown Box from the Heian Court, Kept for the Gods of Kasuga

This round box was made to hold a kanmuri, the stiff lacquered cap worn by nobles and Shinto priests at the Heian court. It was shaped from wood, coated in black lacquer, and decorated with thin metal inlay in the twelfth century. For most of its life it belonged to the sacred treasures of Kasuga Taisha, the shrine founded in the eighth century below the wooded slopes of Mount Mikasa on the eastern side of Nara.

The box has come down to us without its lid. Records kept by the family that owned it say the cover was lost in an earthquake during the Ansei era, in the 1850s. What remains is the cylindrical body, about 24.5 centimeters across the rim and roughly 17 centimeters tall, its walls close to a centimeter thick.

A box of this kind held more than an object. The cap inside was part of the regalia presented to the shrine's deity, the sort of furnishing renewed at Kasuga's periodic rebuildings and then set aside as a sacred heirloom.

Silver and Gold, Set Level with the Black

Look closely at the lacquer and the decoration reads as part of the surface rather than something laid on top of it. This is hyōmon, sometimes read heidatsu, one of the oldest ornamental methods in Japanese lacquerwork. A craftsman cut thin sheets of silver and gold into the shapes of the design, fixed them to the black ground, then brushed lacquer over everything. Once the lacquer hardened, the coating above the metal was scraped and polished back until the silver and gold showed through, flush with the surrounding black.

The effect is quiet rather than showy. Where maki-e builds its patterns up in raised gold powder, hyōmon keeps everything on a single plane, so the metal catches the light only as you shift your angle. The method reached Japan from the continent in the Nara period and was carried into the Heian centuries. Examples that survive in good condition are few.

Why It Matters

The box was named an Important Cultural Property on 28 January 1964. Its value rests on several things at once. Heian lacquer boxes worked in hyōmon rarely survive at all, so any well-preserved example carries weight in the study of early Japanese lacquer.

It also belongs to a celebrated group. Kasuga Taisha holds so many Heian craft objects that the collection is called the Shōsō-in of the Heian period, after the eighth-century imperial repository at Tōdai-ji. Among the shrine's main-sanctuary sacred treasures, now National Treasures, is a black-lacquer hyōmon box that also lost its lid and shares this one's style and technique. The two are close relatives, and this box carries the rare advantage of a documented history.

That history runs through the Daitō family, hereditary priests who served as administrators of Kasuga. An inscription the family kept on an old storage box records that the piece was granted to them in the eighth month of Ōei 3 (1396), naming the Nakatomi officials involved. Few medieval objects of this kind keep a record this precise of how they passed into a keeper's hands.

Seeing It, and What Stands Nearby

The box is in a private collection and is kept at the Nara National Museum. It is not on permanent view. Lacquer is sensitive to light and humidity, and pieces like this appear only in rotating displays and special exhibitions, so anyone hoping to see the original should check the museum's current schedule before a visit. It was shown, for instance, in the 2018 exhibition marking the 1250th year of Kasuga Taisha.

The museum sits inside Nara Park, where wild deer move freely along the paths. A short walk leads to Kasuga Taisha itself and to its National Treasure Museum, where the shrine's Heian sacred treasures are displayed in rotation, including work in the same lacquer tradition as this box. Tōdai-ji, with its great bronze Buddha, and Kōfuku-ji, with its five-story pagoda, stand close by, which makes the eastern side of Nara an easy day on foot.