Jinji Mother-of-Pearl Inlaid Gilt Bronze Portable Shrine

A Palanquin Built for a God

On Saturday afternoons, between one and four o'clock, the priests of Konda Hachimangu Shrine in Habikino, Osaka Prefecture, will unlock a modest concrete treasure house for anyone who asks at the shrine office and pays 400 yen. Inside stands a portable shrine, or mikoshi, that has survived more than eight centuries: the Chiriji Raden Kondoso Shin'yo, a National Treasure of Japan.

The name is a technical inventory of its surfaces. Chiriji refers to a lacquer ground scattered with fine metal filings, then sealed under clear lacquer and polished; raden is decoration in cut mother-of-pearl; kondo means gilt bronze, the material of the fittings that armor its roof and corners. Shin'yo is simply the formal word for a divine palanquin. Shrine tradition holds that Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura shogunate, donated it around 1196, the year he is recorded to have rebuilt the shrine's halls. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the work to the Kamakura period and lists its total height at 214.5 centimeters.

A mikoshi exists to carry a deity. This one was made for the shrine's principal kami, Emperor Ojin, whose colossal keyhole-shaped tomb mound rises directly behind the shrine grounds. During the autumn Hojo-e festival, monks and priests together once bore the palanquin from the main sanctuary across a steep stone bridge toward the tomb, returning the deity briefly to the place of burial. Few objects in Japan connect a fourth-century imperial legend, a twelfth-century warlord, and a living festival quite so directly.

Why It Was Designated a National Treasure

The government first protected the mikoshi in 1915, when it was designated an Important Cultural Property under the prewar system. On June 28, 1956, it was elevated to National Treasure status as a craft object of the Kamakura period, registration number 189.

What persuaded the examiners is the convergence of four crafts in a single piece. The body is a square wooden palanquin crowned by a phoenix. Its lacquered surfaces carry mother-of-pearl inlay over the sprinkled-metal ground. Gilt-bronze openwork fittings reinforce the roof canopy and structural joints. From the eaves hang banners pierced with hosoge, an imaginary floral arabesque of Buddhist art, and beneath them runs a valance of the same pattern together with twelve openwork pendant ornaments called keman, each set with an eight-lobed mirror. Around all four sides hang panels of brocade woven in the Kamakura period, among the very few textiles of that era to survive in such condition.

Architecture, lacquer, metalwork, and weaving, each executed at the highest level available around 1200, and all still attached to the object they were made for. That completeness is rare. Most medieval Japanese textiles survive as fragments in museum drawers; here they hang where they were meant to hang.

One small puzzle remains in the documentation. The official designation name describes the ground as chiriji, while the shrine's own literature calls it nashiji, a related pear-skin sprinkled ground. The two techniques differ mainly in the density and grade of the metal filings, and visitors need not adjudicate; the shimmer is the point.

What to Look For

Start with the phoenix on the roof. The bird marks the vehicle of an exalted being, a convention shared with imperial palanquins, and its gilt silhouette sets the tone for everything below.

Then move close to the lacquer. Under the treasure-house lights the metal-dusted ground reads as a faint constellation behind the mother-of-pearl, which flashes blue and violet as you shift your footing. Kamakura-period raden favored thick shell cut with confidence, and the effect is bolder than the hair-fine inlay of later centuries.

The hanging keman reward patience. Twelve of them circle the eaves, each an openwork plaque framing a small mirror with eight lobes. Mirrors on a mikoshi are not decoration alone; in Shinto practice a mirror can stand for the deity itself.

Give the brocade a long look before you leave. Dyes have softened over 800 years, but the weave structure is intact, and you are seeing cloth that was new when the Kamakura shogunate was new.

The same room holds the shrine's other National Treasure, a set of gilt-bronze openwork saddle fittings excavated in 1848 from a satellite mound of the Ojin tomb, made on the Korean peninsula in the fifth century. Two National Treasures, fifteen minutes' walk from a local railway station, viewed in near solitude: the arithmetic of cultural travel rarely works out this well.

Note that the historic mikoshi no longer leaves the building. The festival procession to the tomb continues every September 15 from 8 p.m., now carried out with a newer palanquin, while the original rests in retirement.

Around Konda Hachimangu

The shrine sits at the southern edge of the tomb of Emperor Ojin, called Konda Gobyoyama Kofun, the second-largest burial mound in Japan and part of the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019. From the rear of the shrine grounds, the Hojo Bridge, a stone arch so steep it looks unclimbable, points across the moat toward the forested mound. You cannot enter the tomb precinct, but the view from the bridge is the closest most visitors will ever stand to it.

The surrounding Furuichi district is dense with kofun of every size; a walking course connects more than a dozen, and Chikatsu Asuka Museum, designed by architect Tadao Ando, lies a short drive south with superb displays on the mound-building age. Access to the shrine is a roughly ten-minute walk from Furuichi Station on the Kintetsu Minami-Osaka Line, about 35 minutes from Osaka Abenobashi Station.