Junnan Kōretsu Hyakuryakushu (back of Paper)

A Single Scroll That Holds Two National Treasures

Turn the Akihagi-jō handscroll over, and a second National Treasure comes into view. The celebrated face of this roughly 8.4-meter scroll at the Tokyo National Museum carries flowing Japanese verse written in cursive script. Its reverse is covered with disciplined columns of Chinese characters, copied by a scribe in Tang-dynasty China. That reverse text is the work registered here: the Enan Kōretsu Heiryaku Kanko, written on the back of paper that is older than the poems on the front.

The title sounds technical, and the object behind it is unusual even by the standards of East Asian manuscripts. Enan Kōretsu (Chinese: Huainan Honglie) is an old alternate name for the Huainanzi, a sprawling philosophical compendium assembled in the Western Han period under Liu An, Prince of Huainan. The portion preserved here belongs to its chapter on military strategy, transcribed together with an old commentary in clean, upright Tang regular script. The manuscript fragment corresponds to the twentieth scroll of that text.

How a Chinese military-philosophy text ended up on the back of a book of Japanese poems is the real story. The Tang manuscript reached Japan as an imported book. Generations later, during the Heian period, a calligrapher took the scroll, turned it, and used the blank reverse to write out Japanese poems and copies of Chinese letters. Front and back are therefore two separate works, made centuries and a sea apart, sharing the same sheets of paper.

Why the Back of a Reused Scroll Became a National Treasure

In 1957 the two faces of the scroll were each designated National Treasures in their own right. The Heian poetry side took the name Akihagi-jō, after its opening words; the Tang Chinese side was listed separately as the Enan Kōretsu Heiryaku Kanko. One physical object, two National Treasure designations on opposite faces, is a rarity in Japan's cultural-property system.

The value of the Chinese reverse rests on how little of its kind survives. Tang manuscripts of the Huainanzi and its commentaries are scarce, and a dated, securely transmitted copy preserved in a Japanese collection offers textual evidence that scholars of early Chinese thought cannot find easily in China itself. The sheet also records a habit of the age: imported Chinese books were precious, and their unused sides were too valuable to waste.

The poetry on the front earned its own designation for different reasons. It is one of the earliest substantial examples of sōgana, a cursive form of the Chinese-derived phonetic script that sits partway between Chinese characters and the hiragana used today. After the poems, the same scroll carries copies of eleven letters by Wang Xizhi (c. 303 to 361), the Chinese master regarded across East Asia as the sage of brush writing. Seven of those eleven letters are known only through this copy, which makes the front of the scroll a source for the study of Wang Xizhi as well.

What to Look For

The first thing most people notice is colour. The scroll is built from sheets of dyed paper joined end to end, shading through whites, blues, browns, yellows, and greens. The tints were chosen to suit the poems, and they give the long handscroll a quiet rhythm as it unrolls.

The two sides reward opposite kinds of attention. The Japanese front is loose and lyrical, the brush rarely lifting cleanly between characters. The Chinese reverse is the opposite: even, deliberate Tang regular script, each character set down with the same composed weight. Seeing both in one object is a short course in how differently a brush can behave depending on what it is asked to record.

Look, too, for a small mark added long after the writing. At the joints between sheets on the reverse, Emperor Fushimi pressed his personal cipher during the Kamakura period, the same gesture he made on another famous scroll in his keeping. These additions track the scroll's passage through imperial hands.

One caution about names. Tradition assigns the first sheet of poems to Ono no Tōfū and the remainder to Fujiwara no Yukinari, two giants of Japanese calligraphy. Neither attribution is proven, and the dating of the Heian writing is itself uncertain, placed somewhere across the tenth to twelfth centuries. The labels are worth knowing, but they remain attributions rather than facts.

Seeing It in Ueno

The scroll belongs to the Tokyo National Museum, in Ueno Park, the oldest and largest of Japan's national museums. Because it is light-sensitive paper, it is shown only on occasion rather than kept permanently on view. The museum rotates national treasures through a dedicated gallery on the second floor of its main building, the Honkan, where a single masterwork is presented at a time and changed every few weeks.

If the scroll is not on display during a visit, the museum's digital archives carry high-resolution images of both faces, which is often the better way to study the small details of the brushwork in any case. Ueno Park itself rewards a longer stay, with the museum's other galleries, the surrounding cluster of national institutions, and the broad walking grounds of the park all within a few minutes of one another.