Ishinpo (Hanai Family Version)

Ishinpō (Nakarai Family Copy): Japan's Oldest Medical Encyclopedia, Preserved for a Millennium

Tucked away among the treasures of the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno lies a set of 30 quietly extraordinary handscrolls. Their paper has yellowed, their ink has faded in places, and their contents are written entirely in classical Chinese. Yet for over a thousand years, the Ishinpō, or "Heart of Medicine," has preserved a body of knowledge so rare that scholars from Japan, China, Korea, and the West have crossed oceans to study it. Compiled in 984 by the court physician Tanba no Yasuyori, this is the oldest surviving medical encyclopedia in Japan — and the copy known as the Nakarai family manuscript is the single most important surviving version. For visitors with an interest in the long history of East Asian medicine, philosophy, and the written word, few objects in Japan reward attention quite so richly.

A Thousand-Year Story of Knowledge and Custodianship

The Ishinpō was completed in the second year of the Eikan era (984) by Tanba no Yasuyori (912–995), a court physician and master acupuncturist. He presented the finished 30 volumes to Emperor En'yū, who accepted them into the imperial court. The work drew on several hundred Chinese medical texts circulating during the Sui and Tang dynasties, many of which were already rare even in their country of origin.

For nearly six centuries the Ishinpō remained within the imperial court, treated as a privileged work of learning. Then, in 1554, Emperor Ōgimachi presented it to the Nakarai family, who held the hereditary post of Ten'yaku no kami — head of the Bureau of Medicine. The Nakarai family kept the scrolls as a closely guarded heirloom. Apart from a brief loan to the Edo shogunate in 1854 for the purposes of producing a printed edition, the scrolls were almost never seen outside the household. In 1982 the family transferred the manuscript to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and two years later, on June 6, 1984, it was designated a National Treasure of Japan. Today it is cared for at the Tokyo National Museum.

The 30 volumes and one additional booklet are not all of the same age. Twenty-seven volumes were copied in the twelfth century during the late Heian period, one volume was added in the Kamakura period, and the remaining two volumes and booklet were supplemented during the Edo period. Viewed together, the set is effectively a layered record of how one precious text was passed down, repaired, and completed over roughly seven centuries.

Why the Ishinpō Was Designated a National Treasure

The Ishinpō is revered for reasons that reach well beyond the history of medicine. Three qualities in particular distinguish it.

First is its role as a literary ark. Tanba no Yasuyori quoted from more than two hundred medical and scholarly works from antiquity through the Sui and Tang dynasties. A great many of those originals have since been lost entirely — in China as well as in Japan — and survive only through the passages preserved within the Ishinpō. For philologists and historians of East Asian thought, the text is therefore a kind of irreplaceable library within a single binding.

Second is its breadth. Organized into thirty thematic sections, the work addresses general principles of medicine, the ethics of the physician, acupuncture and moxibustion, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, dermatology, ophthalmology, toxicology, nutrition, the cultivation of longevity, dietetics, and much more. It gathers together the clinical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of healing as they were understood in the tenth century.

Third, and uniquely significant for the Nakarai copy, is the presence of kana glosses, reading marks, and punctuation entered in both black and vermilion ink. These annotations allowed Heian-period readers to parse classical Chinese into Japanese syntax, and today they give language scholars a rare window into how the educated elite of the eleventh and twelfth centuries actually read literary Chinese aloud. The manuscript is thus prized not only by historians of medicine but by specialists in the history of the Japanese language and of calligraphy as well.

What You Can Expect to See

The Ishinpō is a scroll manuscript, not a printed book. Each of the thirty handscrolls is made primarily of kōzo (paper mulberry) paper, with the first volume measuring about 27.4 centimeters in height and approximately 24.8 meters in length when unrolled. The text is executed in confident, disciplined Heian-period brushwork, the work of roughly ten scribes who shared the copying labor for the bulk of the set.

What visitors often find most moving is not any single page but the texture of use that the manuscript carries. Tiny red dots indicate tonal marks for reading Chinese in Japanese order. Marginal notes offer alternative readings and variant characters. A few volumes bear faint traces of documents on the reverse side — fragments of twelfth-century correspondence and a calendar, reused as writing paper in an age when paper was precious. Taken together, these details give the scrolls a quiet sense of human presence: you are looking at a working book, handled by court physicians across many generations.

Because the Ishinpō is a National Treasure of exceptional fragility, it is not on permanent display. The Tokyo National Museum rotates it into exhibition only for limited periods, typically in the National Treasure Room or in special exhibitions dedicated to Heian-period culture or the history of medicine. Checking the museum's current exhibition schedule before your visit is strongly recommended.

Planning Your Visit to the Tokyo National Museum

The Tokyo National Museum stands at the northern end of Ueno Park, a short and pleasant walk from Ueno Station. From the Park Exit of JR Ueno Station, the museum is about ten minutes on foot along a broad avenue shaded by cherry trees. Uguisudani Station on the JR Yamanote line is a similar distance away, as are the subway stations at Ueno on the Ginza and Hibiya lines and Nezu on the Chiyoda line.

The Honkan (Japanese Gallery), where the Ishinpō is displayed during its rotation periods, is the stately classical building facing the front gate. The National Treasure Room on the second floor, in particular, is worth seeking out on any visit to the museum; its contents change roughly every four weeks, and something remarkable is almost always on view.

The museum is ordinarily open from 9:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon, with last admission half an hour before closing. It is closed on Mondays, except when a Monday falls on a national holiday, in which case the museum closes on the following weekday instead. Hours and closing days may change for special exhibitions and public holidays, so a glance at the museum's official website before your visit is wise.

Around Ueno: Making a Day of It

Ueno Park is one of Tokyo's richest cultural districts, and the Ishinpō sits at the heart of it. Within a few minutes' walk of the Tokyo National Museum you will find the National Museum of Nature and Science, the National Museum of Western Art (a UNESCO World Heritage building designed by Le Corbusier), the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Ueno Royal Museum. Any one of them could absorb an afternoon.

The park itself is worth unhurried time. Shinobazu Pond, with its lotus flowers in summer and its small Bentendō temple on an island, is a lovely counterpoint to the museums. Ueno Tōshōgū Shrine preserves a golden Edo-period sanctuary dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu. To the south, the Ameya-Yokochō market street offers a lively contrast, packed with stalls selling street food, dried goods, and souvenirs. In spring the park becomes one of Tokyo's most celebrated cherry blossom viewing sites, and autumn brings softer, warmer colors that pair beautifully with a slow morning in the museum.