Autumn Hagicho

The Scroll That Caught a Writing System Mid-Change

Roll out the Akihagi-jō and the colors come first: pale indigo, brown, yellow, green, and white, twenty sheets of dyed paper joined end to end into a scroll roughly 8.4 meters long and only about 24 centimeters tall. Across that ribbon of color runs some of the most studied handwriting in Japan. The brush moves in a script that is neither fully Chinese characters nor yet the flowing hiragana of later centuries, but something caught between the two.

The scroll takes its name from its opening line. The first poem begins aki hagi no, "the autumn bush clover," and from those words the whole work came to be called Akihagi-jō, the "Autumn Clover Album." That poem is one of the oldest in the Japanese canon, recorded as number 220 in the Kokin Wakashū, the imperial anthology compiled in the early tenth century.

It is held today at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, where it carries the formal designation Akihagi-jō / Enan Kōretsu Heiryaku Kanko (reverse side). The work belongs to the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage and was designated a National Treasure on 19 February 1957.

Cursive Kana, and the Birth of Hiragana

To understand why this scroll matters, it helps to know what was happening to writing in early Japan. Japanese had no script of its own, so scribes borrowed Chinese characters purely for their sound, a system called man'yōgana. Over time those characters were written faster and looser, their strokes softening into cursive forms. The script on the Akihagi-jō is that intermediate stage, known as sōgana: cursive man'yōgana, the direct ancestor of the hiragana used in Japan today.

Reading the scroll, you can watch the transition in progress. Some characters still hold the shape of the Chinese originals; others have dissolved almost into the rounded kana of a later age. For specialists this makes the Akihagi-jō one of the clearest surviving witnesses to how a borrowed alphabet became a native one. It is the reason the work has been famous among calligraphers for centuries, and the reason it was raised to National Treasure status.

The content shifts partway through. The first fifteen sheets carry 48 waka poems in this cursive kana. The remaining sheets, sixteen through twenty, change subject entirely: here the brush copies out eleven letters by Wang Xizhi (Ōgishi in Japanese), the fourth-century Chinese master revered as the Sage of Calligraphy. Placing native verse beside a Chinese model in a single scroll captures the two currents, continental and Japanese, that flowed together in Heian-period writing.

One Scroll, Several Hands

Who actually held the brush is an open question, and the scroll rewards anyone willing to look closely at the difference between its sheets. Tradition assigns the first sheet to Ono no Michikaze (894 to 966), counted among the three great calligraphers of the age, and the sheets that follow to Fujiwara no Yukinari, another of that trio and a key figure in perfecting the Japanese style. Neither attribution can be confirmed. Some scholars propose later dates and other hands entirely, including the brush of Emperor Fushimi.

What is visible to the eye supports the doubt. The first sheet stands apart. It is hemp paper rather than the mulberry paper of the rest, dyed a soft indigo, and its two poems are written with a confidence and rhythm that the later sheets do not match. The brushwork beyond the first sheet runs heavier and less assured, which is one reason specialists treat the scroll as the work of more than one period and more than one hand.

There is a further surprise on the back. The reverse of the sheets from the second onward carries an older text written in formal Chinese script: the Enan Kōretsu Heiryaku Kanko, a commentary on the Chinese classic Huainanzi, copied in China during the Tang dynasty. In other words, the Japanese poems were written onto the back of paper that already held a Chinese manuscript older than the verse itself. When the scroll became a National Treasure, that reused Tang-dynasty backing was protected along with the front.

Why It Is Called an "Album" When It Is a Scroll

One small puzzle is worth noticing. The name ends in jō (帖), a word that normally means a bound album or a printed copybook, yet the Akihagi-jō is a handscroll. The explanation lies in the Edo period, when the cursive writing on this scroll was so admired that printed rubbing-copybooks were produced for students to learn from. Those copybooks were called jō, and the name attached itself back to the original. The mismatch has bothered enough people that an alternative title, "Akihagi Kakan," has occasionally been proposed, though it never caught on.

The scroll's path to Ueno can be traced through some of its keepers. On the back, at the joints between sheets, sits the personal cipher (kaō) of Emperor Fushimi (1265 to 1317), a sign that the scroll was treasured in the imperial household. It later passed to Emperor Reigen, then through the Arisugawa-no-miya and Takamatsu-no-miya princely houses, before entering the Tokyo National Museum's collection.

Seeing It in Person

A word of practical caution: works of calligraphy on paper are extremely sensitive to light, and National Treasures like this one are exhibited only for short stretches, and not often. The Akihagi-jō is not on permanent view. If seeing the original matters to you, check the museum's exhibition schedule before planning a visit, since the calligraphy galleries rotate their displays regularly.

When it is shown, look first at the contrast the scholars argue over: the assured, open hand of the opening indigo sheet against the busier writing that follows, and the moment the poems give way to the Chinese letters near the end. The dyed papers reward attention on their own, the colors shifting sheet by sheet as the scroll unrolls.

If your visit does not align with a showing, high-resolution images of the entire scroll are available through the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage's online databases, which let you trace the brushwork far more closely than a glass case ever would.

Around the Tokyo National Museum

The museum sits at the northern end of Ueno Park, Japan's oldest public park and a dense cluster of cultural institutions. Within a short walk are the National Museum of Western Art, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the Ueno Royal Museum, along with Ueno Zoo and the pond at Shinobazu. The Tokyo National Museum itself holds the largest collection of Japanese art in the country, so a visit built around one scroll easily expands to fill a day.

The museum is about a ten-minute walk from Ueno Station, served by the JR lines, the Tokyo Metro Ginza and Hibiya lines, and the Keisei line from Narita Airport. Ueno makes a practical base for anyone exploring the older, eastern districts of Tokyo, with Asakusa and the Sensō-ji temple a short ride away.