Remaining Volumes of the Family Register from the 8th Year

A Census Roll from the Year 908

In 908, clerks in Suō Province wrote down the households of Kuga-gō, a farming community in what is now the eastern part of Yamaguchi Prefecture. More than eleven centuries later, part of that register still exists. It survives as a single handscroll, kept not in Yamaguchi but at Ishiyama-dera, a Shingon temple on the southern shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga.

The full name of the document is the Suō Province Kuga District Kuga-gō Census Register of Engi 8. It is classed as an ancient document, a komonjo, and it carries the highest protection the Japanese state can give a cultural object: National Treasure status.

The people listed in it lived under the ritsuryō order, the Chinese-modeled system of law and administration that governed early Japan. Under that system the government counted its subjects in order to assign rice land and to collect taxes and labor. A roll like this one was a working tool of that government, set down in formal vertical columns of brush characters, name and age recorded household by household.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The roll was designated a National Treasure on 31 March 1953. Its importance rests less on beauty than on sheer scarcity.

Under ritsuryō rules, census registers were compiled once every six years and kept for thirty years before disposal. Paper, however, was costly and never wasted. Spent registers were rarely discarded outright. They were passed along to government offices and to temples, where the blank reverse could be used again for fresh writing. Documents reused in this way are known as shihai monjo, literally "paper-back documents," and a surprising amount of early Japanese history reaches us only through them.

This register survives for exactly that reason. On its reverse, a copyist later wrote out a Shingon esoteric text, a procedural manual for receiving the samaya precepts on entering the Diamond Realm (Vajradhātu) mandala. The Buddhist copy is the reason the sheet was kept and treasured. The census on the front simply came along with it, an accidental gift to later historians. The renowned administrative records preserved at the Shōsōin repository in Nara owe their survival to the same habit of thrift.

Census registers from the Heian period are very rare. Together with fragments from Awa (modern Tokushima) and Sanuki (modern Kagawa), the Suō roll is one of the few that let historians read the late ritsuryō state in its own hand. By the early tenth century that state was breaking down. Population records had drifted into fiction. Households underreported their men to escape labor service, kept the dead on the books to hold onto allotted fields, and entered so many women that some registers of the period are filled almost entirely with female names. Set against that background, the Suō register is primary evidence for one of the harder questions in early Japanese history: how a centralized tax state slowly fell apart.

Two Worlds on a Single Sheet

What makes the object quietly compelling is that it holds two unrelated worlds on one surface. One face carries the plain administrative prose of a provincial headcount, the bookkeeping of a faraway government. The other carries the dense ritual vocabulary of esoteric Buddhism, copied out by someone for whom the old register was nothing more than scrap.

The roll also gives names back to people who would otherwise be lost. Among the household heads it records are members of the Wanibe, Haji, and Miyake families, ordinary residents of a Suō village in the early 900s. Their names were set down once by a clerk and then, against long odds, were never erased. To read them now is to meet specific individuals across more than a thousand years.

One practical point is worth keeping in mind before any visit. A fragile paper document of this rank is not on permanent view. It is shown only on rare occasions, at special exhibitions or when loaned to a museum. The reward of a trip to Ishiyama-dera lies in the temple itself, and in understanding that one of its quiet holdings preserves the voices of a vanished community.

Visiting Ishiyama-dera

Ishiyama-dera sits in the city of Ōtsu, where the Seta River drains Lake Biwa. The temple was founded in 747 by the monk Rōben at the wish of Emperor Shōmu, and it remains a major temple of the Tōji branch of Shingon Buddhism. It is the thirteenth stop on the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage, a route of thirty-three temples across western Japan.

The temple takes its name, "Stone Mountain Temple," from the great outcrop of pale wollastonite on which its halls are built; the rock is itself a designated Natural Monument. The Main Hall and the two-storied tahōtō pagoda are both National Treasures, the pagoda said to have been donated by Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1194 and counted among the oldest of its kind in Japan. Readers of classical literature know Ishiyama-dera as the retreat where Murasaki Shikibu is said to have conceived The Tale of Genji.

Temple treasures are displayed in the Hōjōden, a hall set high in the grounds. Special exhibitions are usually held in spring and autumn, when documents, scriptures, and objects connected to The Tale of Genji are brought out. Anyone hoping to see a particular item should check the exhibition schedule before traveling, since the rotation changes and many holdings stay in storage.

The grounds open daily from 8:00 to 16:30. The simplest approach is by the Keihan Ishiyamasaka line to Ishiyama-dera Station, about a ten-minute walk from the gate. From JR Ishiyama Station, local buses run to the Ishiyama-dera Sanmon-mae stop near the entrance. The temple is known for its flowers and autumn maples, so the spring and autumn exhibition seasons also fall at the prettiest times to walk the precinct.