Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) Volumes 22 and 24

Two Scrolls That Carried Japan's First History for a Thousand Years

In the year 720, a committee of court scholars led by Prince Toneri presented the throne with the Nihon Shoki, a thirty-volume chronicle of Japan from its mythical origins to the late seventh century. It was the country's first officially commissioned history, written in classical Chinese, the scholarly language of East Asia at the time. The original manuscript vanished long ago. What survives instead is a scattered family of later copies, and among the oldest and most studied of them are two handscrolls kept at the Kyoto National Museum: Volume 22 and Volume 24, known together as the Iwasaki-bon.

The name has nothing to do with the eighth century. It refers to the Iwasaki family, founders of the Mitsubishi business empire, who owned the scrolls in the modern era before they entered the national collection. The copies themselves were brushed in the mid-Heian period. Scholars who have examined the handwriting and the paper place the work in the tenth to eleventh century, some three hundred years after the text was first compiled, and both scrolls appear to come from a single calligrapher.

Only one Nihon Shoki manuscript in existence is older: a fragment of Volume 10 at the Nara National Museum, called the Tanaka-bon. For Volumes 22 and 24 specifically, the Iwasaki-bon is the oldest copy anywhere.

The two volumes preserved here are not random survivors. Volume 22 covers the reign of Empress Suiko (592 to 628), the era of Prince Shotoku, the Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604, the twelve-rank court cap system, and the first embassies to Sui-dynasty China. Volume 24 records the reign of Empress Kogyoku (642 to 645), when the Soga clan's grip on the court tightened under Soga no Emishi and his son Iruka, ending in the palace assassination of 645 known as the Isshi Incident, the opening act of the Taika Reform. Anyone who studied Japanese history at school has met the events written on this paper.

Why These Scrolls Are a National Treasure

The Japanese government designated the pair a National Treasure on June 9, 1951, in the calligraphy and classical books category, one of the earliest designations under the postwar cultural property law. Three layers of value sit on the same paper.

The first is age and textual authority. Because no original survives, every reading of the Nihon Shoki depends on comparing manuscript copies, and an early copy carries weight. The Iwasaki-bon gives philologists a tenth- or eleventh-century witness to the text, centuries closer to the source than the printed editions most readers know.

The second layer is the calligraphy itself. The text is written in a restrained, rounded hand of the type called wayo, the "Japanese style" that Heian aristocrats developed by softening Chinese models. The museum's curators note that the brushwork shares its character with mid-Heian sutra copies, which is part of how the scrolls are dated. As a specimen of formal Heian book production, the manuscript would merit attention even if its text were unremarkable.

The third layer is the one linguists prize most. The Chinese text is threaded with reading marks, called kunten, added so that Japanese readers could parse the foreign syntax. Five distinct systems of annotation have been identified in these scrolls. The earliest, written in red ink, includes kana glosses, syntactic dots known as okototen, and tone marks; specialists date this red layer to the mid-Heian period, close to the time of copying. Two further layers in black ink were added no later than the late Heian period. Together they record how Japanese scholars of a thousand years ago actually pronounced and construed their own founding chronicle, evidence of early Japanese that exists almost nowhere else.

There is a fourth presence in the margins. At the end of each scroll, the Muromachi-period scholar and court noble Ichijo Kaneyoshi (1402 to 1481) recorded that he had collated the text against a manuscript belonging to the Urabe family, hereditary specialists in the chronicle. He did this twice, in 1451 and again in 1474, leaving kana readings, word-order marks, and notes in black ink. The scrolls thus carry the working traces of one of medieval Japan's most learned men.

What to Look For

A handscroll of Chinese characters can look forbidding at first. Stand close and let the details separate.

Begin with the main text. The columns run with an even, unhurried rhythm, each character built from soft, controlled strokes rather than the angular attack of continental models. This is wayo at its most disciplined, the same aesthetic that shaped the decorated sutras of the Heian court.

Then shift focus to the spaces between and around the characters. The red marks are the oldest annotations: small kana, dots placed at fixed positions around a character to signal grammatical particles, and tone marks borrowed from Chinese phonology. The black marks came later, in more than one campaign. Reading the manuscript is like reading geological strata, with each layer of ink recording a different generation of scholars at work on the same text.

Finally, find the colophon area at the end of a scroll, where Kaneyoshi's fifteenth-century notes sit beside the Heian hand. Four centuries separate the copyist from the annotator, and another five and a half separate the annotator from us.

One practical caution: the scrolls are not on permanent display. Like most National Treasure manuscripts, they appear only in occasional special exhibitions or short rotations in the museum's collection galleries, and years can pass between showings. Recent appearances include the museum's Nihon Shoki anniversary display in 2021, marking 1,300 years since the chronicle's completion, and a calligraphy exhibition in 2023. Check the Kyoto National Museum's exhibition schedule before planning a visit around them. High-resolution images of both scrolls are available on the e-Museum website run by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, which is the most reliable way to study the annotations in detail.

Around the Kyoto National Museum

The museum stands in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, directly across the street from Sanjusangendo, the hall of 1,001 statues of Kannon, itself home to multiple National Treasures. The main Heisei Chishinkan Wing, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi and opened in 2014, hosts the rotating collection displays where manuscripts of this kind appear; the red-brick Meiji Kotokan of 1895 is an Important Cultural Property in its own right and worth a look from the garden even when closed.

From Kyoto Station the museum is about a twenty-minute walk, or a short ride on a city bus to the Hakubutsukan Sanjusangendo-mae stop. Keihan Shichijo Station is roughly seven minutes away on foot. Within walking distance to the north are Hokoku Shrine, the giant bell of Hokoji, and the Kawai Kanjiro Memorial Museum, a preserved potter's house that makes a quiet counterpoint to the grand institutions. Chishakuin and Myohoin temples sit just to the south and east. The surrounding blocks hold tea shops and small restaurants along Shichijo Street, and the Kamo River is five minutes west for a walk along the banks.