Map of Maeda-Sho in Kii Province

A Manor Held on a Single Sheet of Paper

Twenty-three small houses, a run of rice fields, wooded hills, and two rivers closing in from north and south. On one modest sheet of paper, a medieval estate in the Kinokawa valley was set down almost like a bird sees it, with north placed at the top and the whole community visible at a glance. This is the Kii no Kuni Kaseda no Shō Ezu, the Map of Kaseda Estate in Kii Province, kept at Horaisan Shrine in Katsuragi, Wakayama, and designated an Important Cultural Property in 1975.

A shōen was a private landed estate, the basic unit of land ownership and farming through much of Japan's medieval centuries. Few estates left behind a picture of themselves. Kaseda did, and the result has earned the map a place in Japanese middle-school and high-school textbooks as one of the clearest surviving images of how a manor and its people actually sat in the landscape.

How Kaseda Estate Came to Be

Kaseda Estate lay in the western part of Ito District, around the Kasada area of present-day Katsuragi, along the middle reaches of the Kinokawa River. Its early history was unsettled. Records suggest it was first set up around 1147 as land attached to the retired emperor Sutoku, reverted to public land soon after, and later passed to Rengeō-in, the Kyoto hall better known today as Sanjūsangendō.

The turning point came in 1183. The retired emperor Go-Shirakawa granted Kaseda to Jingo-ji, a temple on Mount Takao in the hills northwest of Kyoto. The man behind the grant was the monk Mongaku, who had thrown himself into reviving the then-decayed Jingo-ji and pressed hard for the donation. Formal registration of the estate followed in 1184, and Kaseda remained Jingo-ji land through the medieval period.

The famous map associated with Jingo-ji is thought to have been drawn at that moment of registration, to fix on paper what the temple had just acquired. The version at Horaisan Shrine is closely related to it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs places the shrine's map in the Kamakura period (roughly the thirteenth to early fourteenth century), and the drawing of its trees in particular points to the later part of that era.

Why the Map Matters

An estate map was rarely made for its own sake. It was a working document, drawn up most often when a manor needed to defend its boundaries or its water against a neighbour. Kaseda's edges were marked by bōji, boundary points indicated by stones or stakes, and the map records them as dark dots. The single most carefully placed one sits south of the Kinokawa, where Kaseda met Shibuta Estate, land held by the powerful monastery of Mount Kōya. Because the river kept shifting its course, ownership of the ground between was contested, so that boundary was noted with unusual care.

This is where the two surviving maps part ways. The Jingo-ji version shows five boundary dots; the Horaisan version simplifies them to two. Annotations were also added to the maps over time, jotted in during disputes with neighbouring estates. Those later notes are part of what makes the document so revealing: they show the map being used, not just admired, as evidence in real arguments over land and water.

For all that practical purpose, the map is also a small work of art. The hills and trees are sketched in an ink-painting manner, and the artist took the trouble to distinguish fields from forest and to draw the houses of the estate's residents one by one. It is this combination, an accurate-enough survey and a human picture of a living settlement, that gives the map its lasting value.

What to Look For

The map reads as a single framed view, as if the artist stood in the western paddies of Kaseda and looked back across the whole estate. Several landmarks can still be located on the ground today.

The shrine and the hall

On the right side of the map stand the buildings of a Hachimangū, a shrine to the deity Hachiman. This is the ancestor of Horaisan Shrine, which now keeps the map. Beside it is a dō, a Buddhist hall, identified with the nearby temple of Shingan-ji. Shrine and hall sat together at the heart of estate life, a reminder that religious and agricultural community were not separate things here.

The two rivers and the mountains between them

The estate is hemmed in by the Shizukawa (also called the Anabusegawa) to the west and the Kinokawa to the south. Two hills, Imoyama and Seyama, face each other across the Kinokawa. They are old poetic subjects, named in the eighth-century Man'yōshū anthology, where Seyama was cast as the husband and Imoyama as the wife. Between them rises Funaokayama, a small island-like rise in the river where Jōmon and Yayoi pottery has been found, evidence that people lived along this stretch of water long before the estate existed.

The shape of the land

One detail rewards a closer look. On the map the estate appears almost square, but the actual ground was closer to a triangle. The neat outline reflects how carefully its makers wanted to present the manor's claims, especially along the disputed southern edge.

What the map leaves out

The medieval irrigation channel called the Mongaku-i, which carried water from the Shizukawa over a low ridge into the estate's paddies, does not appear on this map. Local tradition credits Mongaku himself with cutting the channel when the estate was founded. Its absence here is itself telling, and the later copy of the map made in 1650 does show the waterworks, including the weir that fed them.

Around the Site

Visiting Kaseda today is less about the map itself, a fragile paper document that is not on permanent display, than about walking the landscape it recorded. Many of its features survive.

• Horaisan Shrine: said to have been founded in the Hōki era (770–781) when the courtier Wake no Kiyomaro enshrined Hachiman here. Its main sanctuary is a set of four cypress-bark-roofed halls dated to 1614 and designated an Important Cultural Property; the two subsidiary halls flanking them are a prefecturally designated property. The grounds are freely open.
• Shingan-ji: the Shingon temple immediately east of the shrine, the successor to the hall drawn on the map. Its precinct holds a prefecturally designated main hall and a standing statue of Kōbō Daishi (Kūkai).
• Imoyama, Seyama and Funaokayama: the poetic hills along the Kinokawa, an easy detour for anyone interested in the scenery the map preserved.
• Michi-no-Eki Kinokawa Man'yō no Sato: a roadside station by the river, good for local fruit and a rest stop.

The shrine sits about twenty minutes by car from the Kōyaguchi interchange on the Keinawa Expressway, with the Katsuragi-nishi interchange also close by. Anyone hoping to see the original map should check ahead, as it is shown only on special occasions, such as exhibitions at the Wakayama Prefectural Museum.