A Portable Shrine Decorated with Mother of Pearl and Gilt

A Sacred Palanquin Carried from Kyoto

Behind locked doors in a small reinforced hall in the hills of northern Wakayama stands a gilt-bronze portable shrine just over 2.2 meters tall, its pyramidal roof crowned by a bronze phoenix. This is the Ikakeji Raden Kondōsō Mikoshi, the portable shrine of Tomobuchi Hachiman Shrine in Kinokawa City. A mikoshi is the palanquin in which a Shinto deity is believed to ride during a festival procession; this one was never made for a country shrine. It came from Iwashimizu Hachimangū, one of the most powerful shrines in medieval Kyoto, and was carried south into the Tomobuchi valley in 1228.

It is widely regarded as the oldest portable shrine to survive in Japan, or at the very least among the oldest. Most mikoshi were rebuilt every few decades and rarely outlived their own century, so a complete Heian-period example, with its lacquer, shell inlay, and metal fittings still in place, is exceptional.

From Iwashimizu to a Mountain Valley

Tomobuchi was once an estate (shōen) belonging to Iwashimizu Hachimangū, the great Hachiman shrine on the southern edge of Kyoto. By the early eleventh century the valley already lay within Iwashimizu's holdings, and the local Hachiman shrine was founded as a branch (betsugū) of that Kyoto institution.

The provenance of the mikoshi is unusually well documented. A register recording its formal dispatch, dated the eighteenth day of the eighth month of Antei 2 (1228), survives with the object and is designated together with it. According to tradition the transfer was made by edict of Emperor Go-Horikawa. The local story attaches it to a woman named Tsuruchiyo-hime, remembered in legend as Tsuru-hime. As the tale goes, she left her home in the valley to serve at court, won the emperor's affection, and on returning home arranged for a mikoshi modeled on the rites of Iwashimizu to be sent to her family's tutelary shrine. One version adds the detail of a wooden pillow that split in two when her father threw it in anger, the broken halves later reuniting brother and sister. These are folk traditions rather than verifiable history, but the dated register gives the shrine a firm fixed point that few comparable objects can claim.

The object itself is older than its journey. Specialists place its manufacture in the late Heian period, somewhat before 1228, which means it had already been in use at Iwashimizu before being given away.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The mikoshi was first protected as an Important Cultural Property in 1917 and raised to National Treasure status on June 28, 1956. Two things set it apart. The first is age and completeness: very few portable shrines from the Heian period exist at all, and this one retains its structure and the greater part of its original decoration.

The second is the company it keeps. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the shrine is almost identical in form and technique to the National Treasure mikoshi at Konda Hachimangū in Habikino, Osaka, which was reportedly donated by Minamoto no Yoritomo in the 1190s. The two are often called the surviving pair of their kind, the finest portable shrines left from the age. The Tomobuchi example differs in its steeper roof pitch, its surfaces covered throughout with openwork floral metalwork, and the dense gold lacquer ground on the beams and lower frame that gives it its name.

What to Look For

The name of the object is a compact description of its surface. Ikakeji is a lacquer technique in which fine gold powder is sown densely over a lacquered surface, sealed under further coats, and then polished back to a glowing gold ground. Raden is inlay cut from iridescent shell. Kondōsō means dressed in gilt bronze. Read together, the title tells you that this is a gold-grounded, shell-inlaid frame fitted out in gilded copper.

The roof and the phoenix

The roof is a hōgyō form, rising to a single point. Its gilt-bronze surface is worked in openwork patterns of hōsōge, the imaginary "treasure flower" of Buddhist ornament, with scattered floral medallions and circular mirror disks. At the apex a phoenix stands roughly 39 centimeters tall, its head and body cast in gilt bronze and its wings and tail engraved from sheet copper.

Gold ground and shell inlay

Look at the horizontal beams and the lower frame, where the ikakeji ground carries inlaid shell in flowing floral scrolls set with glass. This is the most fragile and most personal layer of the work, the part where a viewer can read the hand of a late-Heian lacquer master rather than a metalsmith.

Hanging fittings and cords

Three kinds of gilt-bronze ornament hang from the structure: a mokō valance set with six lobed mirror plates, a banner-like fitting with three, and a circular kasei with an eight-petalled disk. Each is filled with openwork arabesque, and conservators have praised the springy curve of the petals as a high point of late-Heian metal carving. Braided silk cords in green, purple, brown, and gold complete the assembly; the original brown threads have largely fallen away, and reproductions are used when the shrine is dressed today.

Visiting Tomobuchi Hachiman Shrine

One practical point matters before planning a trip: the mikoshi is not normally on public display. It is kept under strict protection in a hall on the shrine grounds, and casual visitors should not expect to see it. What you can visit is the shrine itself, set on the southern slope of the hill above the Tomobuchi River.

Two of its buildings are Important Cultural Properties in their own right. The main hall (honden) is a three-bay nagare-zukuri structure, and the nearby Dainichi-dō, a survival from the shrine's earlier life as a combined shrine-temple, is an early Muromachi building that was dismantled and repaired in 1933. The hall houses a seated Dainichi Nyorai and a group of other Buddhist images.

The valley is remote. From Kaseda Station the shrine is about a 30-minute drive; a community bus from Uchita Station on the JR Wakayama Line stops at Tomobuchi Hachiman-mae. Because access and any special viewing depend on the shrine's own schedule, it is worth contacting them in advance (0736-79-0198) or asking the Kinokawa City lifelong learning division (0736-77-2511).

Nearby

The mikoshi sits in a part of Wakayama rich in older religious sites. Kokawa-dera, the third temple on the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage, lies down in the Kinokawa basin and is famous for its sprawling garden and its connection to a National Treasure picture scroll. To the north, in neighboring Iwade, Negoro-ji preserves a great pagoda that is itself a National Treasure, the largest surviving structure of its type. Combining the valley shrine with one of these makes for a full day in the cultural landscape along the Kinokawa River.