Kashiwagi Rabbit Raden Saddle

A Heian Saddle Drawn in Shell with an Owl

The Kashiwa-mimizuku Raden Kura is a riding saddle from the Heian period (794–1185), decorated in cut shell across a ground of black lacquer. Its name reads off its imagery: a mimizuku, a horned owl, set among the leaves of a kashiwa oak. The piece belongs to the Eisei Bunko in Tokyo, the museum that keeps the heirlooms of the Hosokawa daimyo family, and it counts among the finest survivors of a particular and short-lived craft, the shell-inlaid saddle.

A Japanese saddle of this type is not a single carved object but an assembly of lacquered wooden parts. Two arched pieces, the front bow (maewa) and the rear bow (shizuwa), rise at either end, joined by a pair of boards called igi that form the seat. Here the front bow stands 29.9 centimeters high and the rear bow 29.0 centimeters, with seat boards 41.8 centimeters long. Every surface is coated in black lacquer, and into that dark ground the picture is laid in shell.

The placement of the design follows a plan. On the outer faces of both bows sits the owl among oak foliage. On the inner faces and along the seat boards the motif changes to broken sprays of oak, branches snapped from the tree and scattered as a quieter pattern. No inscription survives to name a maker or fix a year, and the national database records only the broad attribution to the Heian age.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

Saddles decorated in cut shell form a small group within Japanese craft history. The technique, called raden, sets pieces of iridescent shell, usually the turban shell known as yakogai, into lacquer to build an image. Saddles treated this way appear mainly from the late Heian into the Kamakura period, and few have come down whole. Within that group this one is held up as a leading work. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as outstanding in both design and technique, and as a representative surviving example among shell-inlaid saddles.

Its protected status came in two stages. The saddle was first designated under the older framework for cultural property in April 1935. After the Second World War, when Japan reorganized its heritage system, the piece was raised to the rank of National Treasure under the present Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, in a designation dated March 1954.

What sets the work apart is the handling of the shell. Thin slices were cut to shape, fine details such as feathering and leaf veins were incised with a hairline graver, and the pieces were fixed flush into the lacquer so the design reads as drawing rather than relief. The choice of a single bird as the central image is itself uncommon. Many saddles of the period carry plant scrolls or scattered florals, not a creature observed this directly.

What to Look For

The owl holds the eye first. Birds of prey are scarce in the decorative vocabulary of Heian lacquer, and here the horned owl is worked with enough care that its rounded body and tufted ears stay legible against the oak. Move around the piece and the shell changes color, throwing back blue, green and rose as the angle shifts, since the inlay is real shell and not paint.

The split between the two zones of decoration rewards a slow look. The outer faces, made to be seen, carry the full image of owl and tree. The inner faces and seat boards, caught only in passing, keep to the spare motif of broken oak branches. The figure outside and the fragments inside were composed as one scheme.

There is a further reason to seek this saddle out. Eisei Bunko owns a second shell-inlaid saddle that is also a National Treasure, the Raden Shigure Kura of the Kamakura period, which works the words of a classical waka poem into its decoration through the ashide method, where written characters hide among pictorial elements. To find two National Treasure saddles of this kind in one collection is rare, and seeing them set side by side makes the development of the craft easier to follow.

Around the Eisei Bunko

The museum stands on a corner of what was once the broad Tokyo estate of the Hosokawa family, lords of Higo province in present-day Kumamoto. Its main building, a pale structure from the early Showa years, served as the administrative office of the Hosokawa household before it became a museum. The collection was established in 1950 by Hosokawa Moritatsu, the sixteenth head of the house, to keep the family holdings from being scattered. It now numbers eight National Treasures and dozens of Important Cultural Properties among roughly ninety thousand objects and documents.

Eisei Bunko mounts themed exhibitions about four times a year rather than keeping a fixed display, so any single object, this saddle included, appears only when an exhibition calls for it. Anyone hoping to see it should check the current programme before traveling. Next to the museum lies the Higo-Hosokawa Garden, a Bunkyo ward garden on the former estate grounds, open without charge and rewarding in every season; a gate between the two allows passage during set daytime hours. The museum is about a fifteen-minute walk from Edogawabashi Station on the Tokyo Metro Yurakucho Line, with Toei buses stopping closer at Mejirodai-sanchome.