Ancient Sacred Treasures (handed Down from Asuka Shrine)

A Wardrobe Made for Gods: The Asuka Shrine Treasures

Around the year 1390, a procession of lacquered boxes arrived at a small shrine on the south bank of the Kumano River in what is now Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture. Inside lay silk court robes, a black-lacquered crown, mirrors cast with pairs of cranes, twenty-nine gold-sprinkled combs, and a full set of silver cosmetic implements, down to tweezers and an ear pick. None of it was meant for human use. These objects were offered to the deities of Asuka Shrine as their personal belongings, and they have survived almost intact for more than six centuries.

Today this group of offerings, known as the Koshinpo of Asuka Shrine, is a designated National Treasure in the crafts category, held by the Kyoto National Museum. The set received its designation on June 22, 1955, and passed into state ownership at that time.

What Exactly Is a Koshinpo?

The word shinpo means "sacred treasure": garments, furnishings, and personal effects presented to a Shinto deity. The prefix ko, "old," marks treasures from earlier dedications that were preserved rather than discarded when new sets were offered.

The logic behind these offerings is one of renewal. In Shinto thought, replacing a deity's dwelling and possessions restores the god's vitality, and that regenerated power in turn protects people from disease and disaster. The same idea drives the famous rebuilding of Ise Jingu every twenty years, when fresh sacred treasures are commissioned alongside the new buildings.

Kumano Hayatama Taisha, the grand shrine of Shingu and one of the three great Kumano shrines, once followed a comparable cycle, renewing its halls and treasures roughly every thirty-three years. Asuka Shrine is its auxiliary shrine (sessha), located outside the main precincts at the foot of Mt. Horai, a conical hill barely 48 meters high beside the river mouth. When the main shrine received new treasures, Asuka Shrine received its own smaller set, prepared to the same standard.

A Shogun Revives a Lapsed Ritual

By the late Kamakura period the imperial court could no longer fund the Kumano renewal cycle, and the rebuilding lapsed for decades. It took the intervention of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third Muromachi shogun and the builder of Kyoto's Golden Pavilion, to set things right. In Meitoku 1 (1390) the long-delayed renewal of Kumano Hayatama Taisha was finally carried out under his direction, with military governors of the provinces sharing the cost of the new treasures.

More than a thousand items went to the main shrine; those survive there as a separate National Treasure. The set for Asuka Shrine was commissioned at the same time, and a treasure inventory kept at Hayatama Taisha records what was offered to each sanctuary.

That inventory is what makes the Asuka group so remarkable. When scholars compared the surviving objects against the medieval list, the boxes and furnishings matched almost completely, and core items such as the robe, crown, court trousers, and stone-fitted belt were each present in exactly the recorded number, with little damage. Very few groups of medieval craft objects anywhere in Japan can be checked against their original paperwork this way. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singled out this near-perfect correspondence in its designation notes.

The national database assigns the set to the Muromachi period, while the Kyoto National Museum dates it to around 1390, technically the closing years of the Nanbokucho era. Museum researchers also acknowledge that a few pieces may have entered the group later from other sanctuaries of the main shrine, though nothing in the set is thought to postdate the Muromachi period.

What the Set Contains

The treasures fall into two wardrobes and a suite of furnishings, and the division tells you something charming: Asuka Shrine's deities were dressed as a noble couple of the Kyoto court.

For the male deity there is a complete formal court costume, the sokutai: an outer robe (ho) of white figured silk twill with a small hollyhock pattern, divided over-trousers (ueno-hakama), a lacquered courtier's crown with its own maki-e box decorated with pine-carrying cranes, a leather belt mounted with polished stones (sekitai), and a wooden scepter (shaku) stored in a box sprinkled with paulownia motifs.

The female deity received an unlined inner robe of pale crimson silk, a painted train-skirt, a sash, a false chignon of human hair (gikei), a painted cypress-wood folding fan, and brocade-wrapped shoes. The train-skirt, called the kaifu no mo, is painted by hand with a seascape of shorelines and waves; at 159 centimeters long, it is cut not as the usual wrap-around train but in a rarer single-panel trouser form, a detail textile historians prize.

Then come the furnishings. A cosmetic box decorated in maki-e with pine and camellia holds a white bronze mirror and a complete grooming kit in silver: boxes for tooth-blackening dye, face powder, and incense, plus scissors, tweezers, hairpins, an eyebrow brush, and a chrysanthemum-shaped dish, with one small plate in white porcelain. A matching comb box contains twenty-nine maki-e combs and a single silver one. Three bronze mirrors, each cast with paired cranes among pine, maple, bamboo, or Chinese flowers, rest in their original black-lacquered boxes with inlaid designs. A garment box and a garment rack, both in gold maki-e, complete the household.

Stand in front of the case and the effect is intimate rather than grand. The gods were imagined needing exactly what a Heian-style aristocrat needed, eyebrow brush included.

Where to See the Treasures

The Asuka Shrine treasures belong to the Kyoto National Museum in Higashiyama, Kyoto, accessioned as group I-Ko 68. Like most textiles and lacquerware of this age, they are too fragile for permanent display. Individual pieces appear on rotation in the museum's collection galleries in the Heisei Chishinkan Wing, and the maki-e hand box and combs have featured in past thematic displays. Check the museum's exhibition schedule before visiting; if the koshinpo are not out, the museum's celebrated holdings of painting, sculpture, and other crafts more than fill a visit. Photography rules vary by gallery and are posted on site.

The shrine the treasures came from still stands and welcomes visitors. Asuka Shrine is a ten-minute walk northeast of JR Shingu Station, its vermilion main hall set against the wooded cone of Mt. Horai. The shrine was added to the UNESCO World Heritage property Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range in 2016, as the site of the medieval Asuka-oji, one of the worship stations along the Kumano pilgrimage road. Excavations in its grounds uncovered pit dwellings from the Yayoi and Kofun periods, and a reconstructed dwelling stands in the precinct. Local legend adds a layer of romance: Xu Fu, the Qin-dynasty envoy sent to find the elixir of immortality, is said to have landed here, and a small shrine to him stands beside the main hall.

To see comparable objects in their home region, visit the treasure hall of Kumano Hayatama Taisha in Shingu, which displays items from the main shrine's own thousand-piece National Treasure dedication of 1390.

Around the Museum, Around the Shrine

The Kyoto National Museum sits in one of the city's richest walking districts. Sanjusangendo, with its thousand statues of Kannon, faces the museum across the street. Chishakuin and its garden are five minutes south, and the approach to Kiyomizudera climbs the hillside to the northeast. Kyoto Station is one stop away by bus or a fifteen-minute walk along Shichijo Street.

If you travel to Shingu instead, the town rewards a slow half day. Kumano Hayatama Taisha and its giant sacred conifer are fifteen minutes on foot from the station. Kamikura Shrine, reached by a steep stone stairway of more than five hundred steps, holds the boulder where the Kumano gods are said to have first descended, with a wide view over the rooftops to the Pacific. The Asuka Shrine precinct adjoins the Shingu Municipal History and Folklore Museum, and the Kumano River, route of the old boat pilgrimage to Hongu, flows just beyond.