Materials Related to Kawachiya Yoshimasa

A Brewer Who Wrote to Keep His House Standing

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a sake brewer in the Kawachi countryside sat down to write for readers he would never meet: his own descendants. His name was Tsuboi Gohei (1636–1713), though he is better known by his pen name, Kawachiya Kashō. He farmed extensive fields, ran a brewing business, and read whenever he could. The records he left behind, nine documents now designated together as an Important Cultural Property, open a rare window onto how an educated farmer of early modern Japan thought about money, family, learning, and the discipline of staying afloat.

Kashō lived in Ōgatsuka, a fortified temple town (jinaimachi) in what is today the town of Kanan, Osaka Prefecture. He had watched once-prosperous neighboring households collapse one after another, and the question that gripped him was a practical one: what keeps a family from going under? His answer ran to several volumes.

Nine Documents in Three Generations' Hands

The designated set holds nine items, six of them in Kashō's own hand. The centerpiece is the work usually called the Kawachiya Kashō Kyūki, five volumes he himself titled the Ōgatsuka Raiyūki, or "Origins of Ōgatsuka." Into them he folded the history of his village, the rise and fall of its households, and the moral lessons he drew from both. The volumes are fair copies, written out on half-sheet paper bound in the long horizontal format of a merchant's ledger; the careful hand suggests he meant them to last.

What he read shaped what he wrote. The Kyūki carries the imprint of the popular print culture that spread through early Edo Japan: lecture-texts on the medieval war chronicle Taiheiki, among them the Taiheiki Hyōban Hiden Rijinshō, and the kana-zōshi popular fiction Kanninki ("Record of Forbearance"), a 1659 work by the writer Asai Ryōi. Kashō returns again and again to the fourteenth-century warrior Kusunoki Masashige as his model of a good ruler. He even borrows a habit from the Taiheiki commentaries: after setting down a fact about his village, he writes "as for my judgment" and adds his own opinion.

A separate volume, the Kashō Zakki, ran alongside the Kyūki as a catch-all notebook for things he saw, read, and thought. It is a small stitched booklet, and many of its leaves are scrap paper, the blank backs of documents he no longer needed. Its strength is literary, with waka poetry and notes on the arts filling its pages.

The remaining three items carry the project into the next two generations. Kashō's son Seizaemon and grandson Kosaburō kept up the family record in two volumes known as the Kawachiya Nendaiki, one of them a substantial 237 leaves. The son handed the work on to the next keeper in the tenth month of 1725. A single scroll, the genealogy of the Tsuboi house, ties the archive together and names who wrote what.

Why These Papers Were Designated

Most of the Edo-period documents historians rely on were produced by samurai administrators, temples, or large merchant houses. A detailed personal archive written by a farmer, even a wealthy one, is uncommon. Kashō's six autograph records form one of the fullest bodies of writing that any upper-class farmer of the period left under his own name, and that is the reason the national government designated them an Important Cultural Property on 30 September 2020.

Part of their value lies in thought. Kashō's program of correcting faults, doing good, and steadying the household reads as a homegrown ethics, close in spirit to the merchant morality later systematized as Sekimon Shingaku. Historians of popular thought have long treated the Kyūki as a key source; the influential scholar Yasumaru Yoshio drew on it in his study of what he termed conventional morality, the self-disciplining ideals that took hold among ordinary people in the centuries before Japan's modernization. The documents trace, within one family's papers, how a village reader assembled a library, raised his own learning, and ended up producing books of his own.

Where to Encounter Kashō Today

The original documents are held privately within Shiga Prefecture and are not on regular public display, so seeing the manuscripts themselves is not possible. The place to go instead is where Kashō lived and wrote: Ōgatsuka, in the town of Kanan southeast of Osaka. The old temple town still keeps the shape he knew, its narrow lanes climbing a low plateau above the Ishikawa river.

At its center is Kenshō-ji, the temple known locally as the Ōgatsuka Gobō, founded in the early 1570s as the religious core of the settlement. For three days at the start of September the town holds the Hassaku market, a trading fair with roughly four centuries of history that once drew people from as far as Nara, Wakayama, and Shiga. Nearby Dainen-ji keeps its own Important Cultural Property, a standing wooden statue of the eleven-headed Kannon.

To read Kashō's words rather than view his paper, the practical route is the printed transcription edited by Nomura Yutaka and Yui Kitarō, first published in 1955 and reprinted since, which remains the standard edition of the Kyūki and its companion texts.