Collection of Treasure Letters

Hōkanshū: The Letters That Built Mount Kōya's Memory

Among the fifty-four scrolls of the Hōkanshū is a short letter written in the hand of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the warrior whose fame in Japan rivals any figure of the medieval age. He wrote it while the Taira clan was being driven toward the western sea, acting from the capital to confirm Mount Kōya's claim to an estate that had been seized during the chaos of war. That a document of this kind survives at all is remarkable. That it sits beside imperial edicts, monastic ledgers, and the petition of farmers who could barely write their own names is what makes the Hōkanshū one of the most valuable archives in Japan.

The Hōkanshū (literally "collection of treasured documents") is a National Treasure held at Kongōbu-ji, the head temple of the Kōyasan Shingon school of Buddhism in Wakayama Prefecture. It consists of fifty-four handscrolls containing roughly 692 individual documents, and it forms the first and oldest part of a larger archive known as the Kōyasan Monjo, the temple records of Mount Kōya.

How the Archive Was Made

For more than a thousand years, Mount Kōya accumulated paper. Letters from emperors and retired emperors, orders from the imperial government, land deeds, lawsuit filings, donation records, and the daily correspondence of a vast monastic estate were stored in the treasury of the Mieidō, the hall dedicated to the temple's founder Kūkai. By the Edo period (1603–1868) this accumulation had grown unwieldy, and the monks set about selecting the most important pieces and mounting them as formal handscrolls.

The Hōkanshū was the first set assembled in this way. Two later compilations followed, the Zoku-Hōkanshū (the "continued" collection) and the Yūzoku-Hōkanshū (the "further continued" collection). Taken together, the three sets run to 298 scrolls and fifteen bound volumes and preserve, including later transcribed copies, around 3,689 documents. The earliest among them reach back to the Heian period, with an original document dated to 1115 and a copied document dated to 992, while the latest extend to 1743.

Several of the scroll mountings are worth a second look on their own. Some are said to have been backed with fabric taken from Noh costumes used when Toyotomi Hideyoshi made his pilgrimage to Mount Kōya in the late sixteenth century. The documents inside may be the point, but the temple did not treat their presentation as an afterthought.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The value of the Hōkanshū lies in two things at once: the rank of the people who wrote the documents, and the ordinariness of the life the documents record. On one side are texts issued from the very top of medieval society, including imperial directives and the orders of the warrior government in Kamakura. On the other are the working papers of estate administration, the records that show how a religious institution actually fed and governed itself across centuries.

Most of the documents concern landholdings. Mount Kōya controlled estates scattered across Kii Province and beyond, including the Arakawa, Nate, Konomakuni, Shitomida, Ategawa, and Nabe estates, along with the Ōta estate in Bingo and the Kogi estate in Izumi. Reading through them, a historian can reconstruct how taxes were collected, how disputes were argued, and how authority shifted from the court to the warrior class over the medieval centuries. The collection also preserves nearly the full range of medieval document formats, from government decrees to private land-sale contracts, which makes it a reference work for the study of historical documents themselves.

The archive was first recognized under Japan's earlier protection system in 1908. It was designated a National Treasure under the current Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties on November 14, 1953.

Documents Worth Knowing

The Yoshitsune letter

Scroll thirty-three of the Hōkanshū holds the autograph letter of Minamoto no Yoshitsune mentioned at the start. The episode behind it is concrete. Mount Kōya held the Ategawa estate, and during the upheaval at the close of the Heian period the estate was being unlawfully taken over. Yoshitsune, then serving as the court's deputy in the capital, acknowledged the temple's complaint in writing. Surviving autograph documents by Yoshitsune are exceedingly rare, which is part of why this single sheet draws so much attention.

A statement from the Kamakura regent

Scroll six contains a written reply attributed to Hōjō Yoshitoki, the regent who held real power in the Kamakura shogunate, thought to date to 1224. Documents tied directly to figures of his standing rarely come down to the present in temple archives, and its presence shows how closely Mount Kōya's affairs touched the centers of political power.

Farmers who fought back

The most famous document associated with the Hōkanshū family is not in the Hōkanshū proper but in the companion Yūzoku-Hōkanshū. Dated to the tenth month of 1275, it is a petition by the peasants of the upper village of the Ategawa estate, in present-day Aridagawa, Wakayama. In thirteen clauses written awkwardly in katakana, the farmers accused their estate steward, a member of the Yuasa family, of cruelty and abuse. One line, threatening that those who failed to comply would have their ears cut off and their noses sliced, became so well known that it now appears in Japanese school textbooks. It is one of the earliest surviving documents in which ordinary working people speak in their own voice.

Together these pieces show the range of the wider archive. Letters from Minamoto no Yoritomo and from the wandering poet-monk Saigyō, known in religious life as En'i, sit in the same collection as the complaints of illiterate villagers.

Visiting

The Hōkanshū is kept at the Kōyasan Reihōkan, the treasure museum on Mount Kōya operated by the Kōyasan Cultural Property Preservation Society. The museum holds the largest concentration of the mountain's art and documents, including twenty-one National Treasures.

One thing to understand before planning a trip: the scrolls are fragile and are not on permanent display. They appear in rotation, usually during special or seasonal exhibitions, so anyone hoping to see a specific document such as the Yoshitsune letter should check the museum's current exhibition schedule in advance. Photography is not permitted inside the galleries.

The Reihōkan is open year-round from 9:00 to 17:00, with last admission thirty minutes before closing, and closes around the New Year period and occasionally for exhibition changeovers. Admission is 1,300 yen for adults, 800 yen for high school and university students, and 600 yen for elementary and junior high school students. From Namba Station in Osaka, the Nankai line reaches Gokurakubashi in about an hour and a half, where a cable car climbs to Kōyasan. From the cable car terminus, a local bus runs to the Senjuinbashi stop, a ten-minute walk from the museum, or to the Reihōkan-mae stop directly outside.

Around Mount Kōya

Mount Kōya is a monastic town of more than a hundred temples set in a high basin in the mountains, registered as part of the UNESCO World Heritage "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range." A few minutes from the Reihōkan stands the Danjō Garan, the central temple complex Kūkai laid out in the ninth century, with its towering vermilion Konpon Daitō pagoda. Kongōbu-ji itself, the administrative head temple, lies nearby and is known for its painted sliding screens and one of Japan's largest rock gardens.

The spiritual heart of the mountain is Okunoin, reached by a two-kilometer path lined with more than 200,000 memorial monuments under towering cedars, leading to the mausoleum where Kūkai is believed to remain in eternal meditation. Many visitors stay overnight in a shukubō, a temple lodging, to join the early-morning rituals and eat the vegetarian cuisine for which the mountain is known.