Rikuhara Nanboku Kacho (Paper and Ink Writing)

A Single Scroll That Counts the Dead

On the ninth day of the fifth month of 1333, in a temple courtyard at the foot of the Ōmi hills, the Kamakura shogunate's last representatives in the capital ran out of road. Hōjō Nakatoki, who held the northern command of the Rokuhara Tandai, the shogunate's enforcement office in Kyoto, had fled east along the Nakasendō highway with two retired emperors and the reigning Emperor Kōgon in his charge. At Banba, a post town in Ōmi Province, the warrior Sasaki Dōyo closed the way ahead. Nakatoki turned into the precincts of Renge-ji and, with the men who had followed him, took his own life before the main hall.

What survives from that day is not a battlefield but a list. The Rokuhara Nanboku Kakochō, a paper handscroll written in ink, records the names of those who died with Nakatoki so that the temple could pray for them. It is held at Renge-ji in Maibara, Shiga, and was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1917.

What "North and South" Means

The Rokuhara Tandai was run by two deputies, a northern officer and a southern officer, posted to Kyoto after the Jōkyū War of 1221 to watch the imperial court and govern the western provinces. Nakatoki led the northern office; Hōjō Tokimasu held the southern. When Ashikaga Takauji turned against the shogunate in the fifth month of 1333 and attacked, both offices collapsed within days, and Tokimasu was killed during the retreat. The phrase in the register's title, "Rokuhara North and South," names both commands, gathering the dead of each into one account.

The medieval chronicles give different figures, but the number most often repeated is 432, the toll said to have fallen at Banba. To read the scroll is less an exercise in military history than an encounter with a roll of individual names, each one a person who chose to follow his lord rather than be taken alive.

Why the Scroll Matters

A kakochō is a Buddhist register of the dead, usually a working book in which a temple enters the names and death dates of those it memorialises. Most are ordinary parish records. This one is not. It was written close in time to the event it commemorates, during the Nanbokuchō period, and it documents a single catastrophic day in the fall of the Kamakura shogunate. For historians it is a primary source on who was present at Banba, and on the makeup of the men who served the Rokuhara office in its final hours.

The register was known to scholars well before the modern heritage system existed. It was copied into the Gunsho Ruijū, the great Edo-period compendium assembled by the blind scholar Hanawa Hokiichi, which secured its place in the written record. The designation of 1917 recognised both the age of the scroll and its value as a record of a turning point in Japanese history.

Visiting Renge-ji

Renge-ji stands in Banba, once the sixty-second post station on the Nakasendō between Kyoto and Edo. The temple traces its origins to a much older foundation and was rebuilt in 1284 by the priest Ikkō Shōnin as a Pure Land temple under the mountain name Hachiyōzan. The graves of Nakatoki and his followers still stand in rows within the precincts, a field of weathered stone markers that gives the events of 1333 a physical weight no text can match.

The scroll itself is a fragile ink document and is not kept on permanent open view. It is shown in the temple's treasure room, and access can depend on the day and on arrangements made beforehand, so travellers who come for the object as much as the place should ask in advance. Even when the original is not out, the cemetery, the temple's old bronze bell, and the quiet of the grounds repay the visit.

Around Banba

Banba rewards anyone curious about the road culture of premodern Japan. The old Nakasendō still threads through the town, and the post-station plan is legible in the street pattern. The place is remembered in the theatre as well: the playwright Hasegawa Shin set his popular drama Mabuta no Haha here, and a statue of its wandering hero, Banba no Chūtarō, stands in the town. Maibara lies a short drive from the Maibara interchange on the Meishin Expressway and is easily reached by rail, with Maibara Station a major junction on the Tōkaidō line and the Shinkansen.