Silver-Plated Leather Belt

A Court Belt Set with Crystal

At the center of this leather belt sits a small dome of rock crystal, no wider than a fingertip. Red pigment was laid beneath it, so the clear stone seems lit from within. Around it run fifteen rectangular plaques of copper, each plated in silver and worked in relief with hunters, deer, and mandarin ducks. This is the ginsō kakutai, a silver-mounted leather belt that once cinched the formal robes of a Heian-period aristocrat.

Belts of this kind, known as sekitai, were worn over sokutai, the most formal court dress of the Heian aristocracy. The number, shape, and material of the ornamental plaques signaled the wearer's rank. This example is long enough that the surplus would have been carried around the back and tucked beneath the band, left to hang behind in the manner court attire demanded.

The belt is kept at Dōmyōji Tenmangū, a shrine in Fujiidera, on the southeastern edge of the Osaka plain. It is dated to the Heian period and follows the decorative style of Tang-dynasty China; one reading holds that the metalwork itself was made on the continent around the ninth century. It survives as one of six objects long said to have belonged to Sugawara no Michizane, the scholar and statesman the Japanese later worshipped as Tenjin, the deity of learning.

The Relics of a Disgraced Minister

Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) rose through the Heian court on the strength of his scholarship, reaching the second-highest office of state. Rivals at court engineered his downfall, and in 901 he was demoted and sent far south to Dazaifu in Kyushu, where he died two years later, far from the capital.

What followed entered legend. A run of lightning strikes, plagues, and untimely deaths among his former enemies was read in Kyoto as the work of Michizane's angry spirit. To calm him, the court built shrines in his honor, and over time the wronged minister was elevated into Tenjin, the god to whom students still pray before examinations.

According to tradition, before his death Michizane left instructions that his personal effects be carried to his aunt, the nun Kakuju-ni, who lived at Haji-dera, the temple of his mother's Haji clan. That temple later became Dōmyōji, and the objects passed in turn to the neighboring shrine. The six surviving pieces are grouped under the name den Kankō ihin, the relics traditionally attributed to Lord Sugawara. The word den, meaning "said to be," is the honest part of the title: there is no firm proof the belt was his. What scholars can say is that the objects are genuine work of the early Heian era or earlier, several of them with almost no parallel outside the imperial Shōsōin repository in Nara.

The belt was recognized as an Important Cultural Property in 1951 and raised to National Treasure, Japan's highest designation, in 1953. The other five relics each carry the same rank: a bluish-white porcelain inkstone fired at a Tang kiln, an ivory court baton, a tortoiseshell-and-ivory comb, a rhinoceros-horn-handled knife, and a bronze mirror showing the ancient Chinese musician Bo Ya at his zither.

Reading the Fifteen Plaques

Look closely and the belt rewards the attention. Each silver-plated plaque is punched all over with a fine ground of tiny raised dots, a technique called nanako, or "fish roe," that catches light like beaded metal. Against that ground the craftsman set small hunting scenes in relief.

The scenes fall into three groups. On five of the plaques a hunter on horseback draws his bow above a pair of mandarin ducks. On four, a pair of deer accompanies a pair of ducks. On the remaining six, two ducks appear with a single deer. Mandarin ducks signified marital devotion, and the mounted hunt was a favorite subject of Tang metalwork, so the imagery places the belt squarely in the cosmopolitan taste of the eighth and ninth centuries.

The buckle and the strap-end carry the same decoration, and even the three small holes that anchor the buckle are framed with heart-shaped fittings, a motif Japanese craftsmen call inome, the "boar's eye." Each plaque measures a little under three centimeters tall and six wide. Worn leather and a few losses to the silver mounts show the belt's age plainly, which only sharpens the sense that you are looking at something a living person once buckled on.

Around Dōmyōji

The shrine sits a three-minute walk west of Dōmyōji Station on the Kintetsu Minami-Osaka Line. Its grounds reach back more than a thousand years to the Haji clan, the family of artisans credited with making the clay haniwa figures that ringed ancient burial mounds; a reconstructed kiln and a replica shura, the wooden sledge once used to haul tomb stones, stand in the precinct. The clan's ancestor Nomi no Sukune is also remembered as a founder of sumo, and a small earthen ring marks the connection.

Just across the road lies Dōmyōji itself, a quiet convent that was once the shrine's attached temple. Its main hall holds another National Treasure, a standing eleven-headed Kannon said to have been carved by Michizane, shown to visitors on fixed days each month. The shrine is best known locally for its plum garden of some eight hundred trees, which draws crowds through February and March.

The wider district is a landscape of imperial tombs. Fujiidera lies within the Furuichi cluster of the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019, where colossal keyhole-shaped mounds from the fourth and fifth centuries rise among the suburban streets. A morning at the shrine pairs naturally with a walk to one of the great tombs nearby.