Documents recounting the Joseon Tongsinsa/ Chōsen Tsūshinshi (Korean embassies to Japan)

Documents recounting the Joseon Tongsinsa/ Chōsen Tsūshinshi (Korean embassies to Japan)​

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Prefecturally Designated Important Cultural Property (designated 2016)
Made (variously): Kan'ei 20 (1643), Meireki 1 (1655), Shōtoku 1 (1711-12)
Honrenji temple, Ushimado, Ushimado Town

Honrenji temple, which sits near to Ushimado harbor, contains a trove of documents regarding the Joseon Tongsinsa/ Chōsen Tsūshinshi (Korean embassies to Japan). These nine scrolls, written in a Chinese poetic style, relate to the Korean embassies to Honrenji temple and were written by visiting dignitaries of the 5th (1643), 6th (1655), and 8th embassies (1711). The authors can be discerned from their signatures, from notes that were added later, and from paper slips inserted into some of the documents that record the scrolls’ titles. These poems mainly consist of descriptions of the scenery of Ushimado and Honrenji temple.
In addition, seven of the nine scrolls of Chinese poems are written in the form of gogon risshi (poems made up of eight lines of five characters each). Based on the way that these have been purposefully made to include a rhyming structure which connects the different poems, we can see how both Honrenji temple and the envoys made a conscious effort to make the exchanges more than just one-offs, setting up future interactions by means of their writing. This alone makes these documents valuable evidence of the cultural exchange between Japan and Korea in the Edo period (17th c.).

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Cultural properties in Setouchi city​