Tutelary Deities and Administrators of Wakasa Province

This narrative handscroll has a distinctive composition; it consists of the origin of the Ichinomiya and Ninomiya shrines in Wakasa province (now southwestern Fukui prefecture) with descriptive annotations for each scene, followed by portraits of successive generations of Shinto priests of the Kasa clan who administered the shrines. In scenes from the first existing section of the scroll, the ancestor of the shrine priests of the Kasa family, Takafumi, respectively welcomes the male deity Wakasahiko and the female deity Wakasahime, who descend on the white cliffs at the source of the sacred Yoshikawa river in the village of Saigō in Onyū county, and builds the first shrine, Ichinomiya, for him and the second shrine, Ninomiya, for her. The original first section, which may have consisted of text and illustrations of the descent of Wakasahiko, has been lost, however, the scene of Takafumi running after Wakasahiko, who rides upon a white horse on a cloud, to determine a suitable place for this deity’s shrine, remains intact. The next scene shows Takafumi, sitting upright with a gohei (Shinto purification rod decorated with folded paper streamers) in hand, in front of the Ichinomiya Shrine that he built, followed by an illustration of the Kurodōji Shrine in which Takafumi himself is later enshrined. Next is the manifestation of the female deity Wakasahime on the white cliffs, followed by another scene of Takafumi again holding a gohei in front of a shrine.
The second section features the shrine priests, facing one another in pairs: one as a divine figure in formal court attire, seated on a raised dais (raiban); the other in informal court attire, seated on a tatami mat. The portraits of the priests up to the twelfth-generation Kagetsugu (1205–1299) were produced in the Kamakura period, while the priests of later generations were painted during the early modern period ending with the thirtyfirst generation Masafusa, who died in 1800.
The origin tale of the shrines and the portrait of the priests up to the twelfth generation are rendered in sharp, elegant lines and bright colors. The powerful brushstrokes used to distinctively depict the priests are also outstanding and exemplify the stylistic succession of the traditional nise-e, or realistic portraits, in which fine lines were skillfully used.