Shizutani School Related Materials

The library of a school for commoners

Shizutani School Related Materials is a collection of 4,041 items held at the Okayama Prefectural Museum in Okayama City, Okayama Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property in the historical materials category in 2002. It is the working library and teaching stock of Shizutani School, the school for commoners that the Okayama domain opened in 1670.

Okayama Prefecture's description of the designation is precise about where the collection sat. The items were kept in the Bunko, the storehouse built inside the school grounds in 1677, and they consist mainly of books: Chinese classics and Japanese texts used by the teachers and worked through by the students, with some paintings and objects among them. The whole lot came to the prefecture and is now in the museum's care.

Most surviving cultural property from an Edo period school is architecture. Shizutani School Related Materials is the other half of the picture, the part that tells you what was actually read in the buildings.

Why a stack of books was designated

The designation was made on 26 June 2002, and the register counts every item: 4,041. Okayama Prefecture is the owner. The category, historical materials, is one of the smaller ones in the national system, and nationally designated examples in the prefecture can be counted on one hand.

The case rests on completeness rather than on any single treasure. Domain schools and local schools across Japan lost their libraries when the Meiji reforms closed them and their holdings were dispersed. Shizutani kept its books together because the school itself was never quite abandoned; it was reopened, renamed and eventually taken over by the prefecture, and the Bunko went on standing inside the walls the whole time. What survives is therefore not a selection but a stock, and a stock can be read as evidence.

That is the value the appraisal points to. Shizutani School Related Materials shows the curriculum of a Confucian school for farmers' and townspeople's sons as it was actually stocked, rather than as a prospectus described it.

What the collection contains

Books dominate. The teaching material is Chinese: the Confucian canon and the commentaries that a school following Zhu Xi's reading would have needed, alongside Japanese texts. Both the copies a teacher would consult and the copies handed to students are present, and it is the student copies that are the harder half to find elsewhere.

Beyond the books there are paintings and objects. These are the minority of the 4,041 items and they are the part that gives the collection its texture, since a school is not only a reading list.

The building the collection came out of is worth knowing about even though it stays at Shizutani. The Bunko is a thick-walled Dozo-zukuri storehouse of 1677 with a set of layered earthen doors at its entrance, built against fire, damp and theft in that order. Books were shelved to the left and right of a central stair. Standing in front of it on the school grounds and then meeting the contents in a museum case in the prefectural capital is an odd split, and it is why this designation stands apart from the ones covering the buildings.

Seeing Shizutani School Related Materials

The collection is at the Okayama Prefectural Museum, on the outer grounds of Korakuen garden at 1-5 Korakuen in Kita Ward. It is not on permanent display. Whether any of it is out depends on what the museum has installed, so check the current exhibition before making a special trip for it.

The museum opens from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. between April and September, and from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. between October and March. It closes on Mondays, moving the closure to the next weekday when a Monday falls on a public holiday, and it also closes during exhibition changeovers and at the end of December. Admission to a theme exhibition is 260 yen for adults and 130 yen for visitors aged 65 and over, with high school students and younger admitted free.

Researchers who need to examine or photograph specific items apply for special viewing through the museum's curatorial section. The museum asks for a written application with a description of the intended use, and says the process takes two to three weeks, so this is not something to arrange on the day.

From JR Okayama Station, take a bus from stop 1 at the east exit and get off at Korakuen-mae, about ten to fifteen minutes, or ride the tram to Shiroshita and walk. Parking is shared with Korakuen. Seeing the school buildings themselves means a separate trip east to Bizen City.