Zokuhokanshu

Zoku Hōkanshū: The Paper Memory of Mount Kōya

Bound into seventy-seven handscrolls and six booklets are roughly eight hundred and thirty original documents that the monks of Mount Kōya judged too important to lose. Letters from emperors and warlords sit beside complaints scrawled by farmers in rough katakana. Collected over centuries, sorted and remounted by Edo-period archivists, and kept in the treasury behind the temple's great image hall, this archive carries the formal name Zoku Hōkanshū, the Continued Collection of Treasured Documents. It is one of Japan's National Treasures, and it reads less like a single object than like the working memory of an entire mountain.

Most visitors come to Kōyasan for its cedar-lined cemetery and its temple lodgings. Fewer realize that the same mountain holds one of the richest surviving paper records of medieval Japan.

What Zoku Hōkanshū Actually Is

The temples of Mount Kōya accumulated paperwork for more than a thousand years: deeds, edicts, letters, petitions, accounts. Scholars call this whole body of material the Kōyasan monjo, the Kōya documents. During the Edo period the head temple, Kongōbu-ji, set about putting the most valuable pieces in order. Archivists selected documents that had been stored loose in the treasury of the Mieidō, the hall enshrining the temple's portrait of its founder Kūkai, and mounted them in sequence as handscrolls and stitched booklets.

The work produced three sister collections, compiled one after another. The first, Hōkanshū, runs to 54 scrolls holding 692 documents. The second is Zoku Hōkanshū, the subject of this article, with 77 scrolls, 6 booklets, and 831 documents. The third and largest, Mata-zoku Hōkanshū, fills 167 scrolls and 9 booklets with 1,979 documents. Counted together with later copies, the three collections gather some 3,689 documents into 298 scrolls and 15 booklets, spanning the years from 805 to 1743. That is roughly nine centuries of continuous record-keeping, preserved in one place.

Zoku Hōkanshū is the middle volume of this trio. Its documents range across the Heian, Kamakura, Nanbokuchō, Muromachi, and Momoyama eras, which is why the national register simply lists its period as Heian through Momoyama.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

The value of the collection lies in what the documents are: originals, not later transcriptions, written by the people who actually governed, prayed, fought, and farmed. The three Hōkanshū collections were first granted national protection in 1908. In 1953, under the postwar cultural property system, Zoku Hōkanshū was elevated to the rank of National Treasure, designated on the 14th of November that year alongside its companion volumes.

For historians these scrolls are first-rank source material. Where a chronicle written long after the fact may smooth over inconvenient detail, an original edict or a farmer's signed grievance preserves the friction of the moment it was made. The Kōyasan archive is one of the few places where documents of imperial, aristocratic, warrior, and peasant origin survive side by side across so long a span, which makes it indispensable to the history of the mountain and to the study of medieval Japan as a whole.

What the Documents Reveal

The contents of the three collections read like a cross-section of medieval society. There are temple records and ritual texts. There are imperial documents: rinji and in'zen, the directives issued in the name of retired and reigning emperors, and gganmon, written prayers, including pieces connected to Emperor Go-Shirakawa and other sovereigns. There are instruments of secular power, among them Council of State edicts, official directives known as migyōsho, lower-rank orders, and the vermilion-seal letters of later military rulers.

Famous hands appear throughout. The collections preserve letters associated with Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura shogunate, and with his younger brother Minamoto no Yoshitsune, as well as correspondence linked to the wandering poet-monk Saigyō, known in religious life as Enni. One celebrated letter in Yoshitsune's own hand concerns the estate of Ategawa, a Kōya landholding in what is now Wakayama Prefecture. During the upheaval of the late twelfth century the estate came under threat, and Yoshitsune, then acting as a deputy in the capital, upheld the mountain's claim to it.

The Ategawa estate also gave rise to the most quoted document in the entire archive. In 1275 the peasants of the estate's upper village sent their landlords a thirteen-point complaint against the local steward, the Yuasa family, writing in blunt katakana rather than formal Chinese-style prose. The line that schoolchildren in Japan still encounter in their textbooks runs roughly: when we are late delivering timber, they cut off our ears, slice off our noses, shave the women's hair, and bind and torment us. Few medieval documents anywhere give so direct a voice to ordinary people. It survives because the monks of Kōya, who were the estate's distant landlords, kept it.

The scrolls themselves repay a close look. Their mountings were assembled from whatever fine cloth was at hand, so the backing fabrics vary from scroll to scroll. Tradition holds that some of the most elegant mountings reuse fabric from Noh costumes worn during the visit of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi to Mount Kōya, a detail that, if true, folds a second layer of history into the objects.

Seeing the Collection, and the Mountain Around It

The documents are owned by Kongōbu-ji and cared for by the Kōyasan Cultural Property Preservation Society. They are not on permanent display. Like most light-sensitive paper treasures, they are shown only in rotation, and the place to look for them is the Kōyasan Reihōkan, the mountain's museum of sacred art a short walk from the central Danjō Garan temple complex. The Reihōkan holds 21 National Treasures and around 150 Important Cultural Properties, and it changes its exhibits through the year, so checking the current display list before a visit is the surest way to time a trip to the documents. Portions also travel occasionally to major exhibitions, including at the Tokyo National Museum.

Even when the scrolls themselves are resting in storage, the mountain that produced them is worth the journey. Kōyasan is the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, founded by Kūkai in the early ninth century, and the whole settlement forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage site recognizing the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes of the Kii Mountain Range. The Okunoin cemetery, with its avenue of ancient cedars leading to Kūkai's mausoleum, and the vivid pagodas of the Danjō Garan, give context to the archive: these are the institutions whose daily business the documents recorded.