Song Dynasty Book History Collection

A Thousand-Year-Old Printed Book Above Osaka's Medicine Street

Eleven thread-bound volumes, their pages printed from hand-carved woodblocks roughly a thousand years ago, rest in a climate-controlled vault on Doshomachi, the street in central Osaka where Japan's pharmaceutical industry was born. They contain large portions of the Shiki shikkai (Ch. Shiji jijie), the earliest surviving commentary on the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, the foundational work of Chinese historiography. The Japanese government designated the set a National Treasure on November 22, 1952, under the name Sokanbon Shiki Shikkai, meaning the Song-dynasty printed edition of the Shiji jijie.

The owner is the Takeda Science Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the pharmaceutical company Takeda. Its rare-book library, the Kyou Shooku, occupies the company's handsome 1928 former headquarters building. Few travelers passing through Osaka's business district suspect that one of the rarest printed books in East Asia sits a four-minute walk from Kitahama subway station.

What the Book Is

The Shiji was completed by the Han-dynasty court historian Sima Qian (ca. 145 to 86 BCE). Organized into 130 chapters of annals, tables, treatises, hereditary houses, and biographies, it narrates Chinese history from the legendary Yellow Emperor down to Sima Qian's own lifetime, and every later Chinese dynastic history followed its model.

A text that influential attracted commentators. The earliest whose work survives intact is Pei Yin, a scholar of the Liu Song dynasty active in the fifth century and the son of Pei Songzhi, the celebrated annotator of the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Pei Yin gathered the glosses of earlier scholars on pronunciation, geography, and meaning, and wove them into the Shiji text. His compilation, the Shiji jijie or Collected Explanations, became the first of the so-called Three Commentaries, followed centuries later by Sima Zhen's Suoyin and Zhang Shoujie's Zhengyi in the Tang period.

The Kyou Shooku set is a printed edition of Pei Yin's work produced during China's Song dynasty, the great age of woodblock publishing. Of the 130-chapter structure, the eleven surviving volumes preserve chapters 31 to 39, 44 to 60, 81 to 101, and 109 to 130. A fragmentary set, in other words, but a very substantial one.

Northern Song or Southern Song? A Dating Puzzle

The official register of the Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the period as Southern Song (1127 to 1279). The library's own published scholarship tells a more precise and more remarkable story. According to the exhibition commentary issued by the Kyou Shooku, the printing carries no colophon recording its date, but its layout, characters per line, and taboo-character omissions closely match a Northern Song edition recorded in the catalog of the Tieqin Tongjian Lou, one of Qing China's most famous private libraries. On that basis the set is judged to be a Northern Song printing of the same family, datable to the reign of Emperor Renzong (1022 to 1063) or earlier.

If that assessment holds, the book was printed within living memory of the invention of large-scale commercial woodblock publishing. Northern Song printings of the Shiji are described by the library as exceedingly rare survivals; most Song editions of the work that exist today, in China or Japan, date from the Southern Song or later. Visitors who have seen the volumes on display often remark on how crisp the characters remain after nearly a millennium.

One nuance deserves mention. Ten of the eleven volumes belong to the Northern Song printing. The eleventh, covering chapters 50 to 60, is a Southern Song printing supplied at some point to fill a gap, so the set as designated combines two closely related editions.

From Meiji Scholars to a Pharmaceutical Fortune

The set's modern history reads like a roll call of Japanese sinology. The ten Northern Song volumes were formerly owned by Takezoe Koko (1842 to 1917), the Meiji-era diplomat and classical scholar known by his literary name Seisei. The supplementary Southern Song volume came from the collection of Tomioka Kenzo (1873 to 1918), the Kyoto scholar of Chinese antiquities and son of the painter Tomioka Tessai.

Both strands then converged in the library of Naito Konan (1866 to 1934), professor of East Asian history at Kyoto Imperial University and one of the founders of the Kyoto school of sinology. Konan's theory that the Tang-Song transition marked the beginning of China's early modern age still shapes the field. After retiring he settled at a villa called Kunisanso in the hills of present-day Kizugawa, Kyoto Prefecture, surrounding himself with tens of thousands of books. After his death, the choicest portion of that library, 97 items now known as the Kunisanso rare books, was acquired by Chobei Takeda VI and eventually entered the Kyou Shooku. All three of the library's National Treasures, this Shiji set, the Tang-dynasty manuscript fragment of the Shuowen jiezi wood radicals, and the Southern Song printed Mao shi zhengyi, came through the Kunisanso collection.

The Kyou Shooku itself has an origin story rooted in disaster. When the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed countless rare books in Tokyo, Chobei Takeda V resolved to protect Japan's and China's medical and pharmacological literature from a similar fate and began buying entire collections with his private funds. The library he built, named Kyou Shooku, or Apricot Rain Library, after the legend of the physician Dong Feng who took payment in planted apricot trees, was donated to the Takeda Science Foundation in 1977 and opened to the public in 1978. In 2013 it moved from the Juso factory district to its present home on Doshomachi.

Seeing It, and What Else to Look For

The Kyou Shooku operates as a working research library with a free exhibition room. The permanent display rotates items from the collection with explanatory panels, and twice a year, in spring and autumn, the library mounts special exhibitions. The National Treasure volumes are not on permanent view; they appear when an exhibition theme calls for them, as in the autumn 2023 show devoted to the Kunisanso rare books, where all three National Treasures were shown together. Checking the exhibition schedule on the foundation's website before a visit is essential.

Admission is free. The exhibition room opens on weekdays from 10:00 to 16:00 and closes on Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays, and the year-end period. Photography inside follows the library's rules, so ask at reception.

Even when the Shiji volumes are resting in the vault, the displays reward attention. The collection ranges from Dunhuang manuscripts to Edo-period anatomical drawings, and the building itself, a dignified brick-toned office block from 1928 with a modern annex, speaks of the era when Osaka was Japan's commercial capital.

Around Doshomachi: Streets of Medicine and Merchants

Doshomachi has dealt in medicine since the seventeenth century, when licensed wholesalers controlled the nationwide drug trade from this single street. That heritage is easy to explore on foot.

• Sukunahikona Shrine, two blocks east, enshrines both the Japanese deity of medicine and Shennong, the legendary Chinese patron of herbalists. Pharmaceutical companies still line its narrow approach, and the shrine's November festival fills the street.
• The Kusuri no Doshomachi Museum, inside the Sukunahikona Shrine building, traces four centuries of the medicine trade with free admission.
• Tekijuku, a ten-minute walk west, preserves the 1838 academy where the physician Ogata Koan taught Dutch learning; the future founder of Keio University, Fukuzawa Yukichi, studied here in the original wooden building.
• Kitahama, the riverside financial district just north, offers the Osaka Exchange building, retro cafes in early twentieth-century banks, and a pleasant walk along the Tosabori River toward Nakanoshima's rose garden and museums.

Access is simple: four minutes on foot from Kitahama Station exit 6 on the Sakaisuji subway line, or six minutes from Yodoyabashi Station exit 11 on the Midosuji line.