Minister Kibi's Adventures in China (Kibi daijin nitto emaki)

Four twelfth-century Japanese handscrolls, running to some twenty-four metres of painted surface, telling a wildly unhistorical story about a real Japanese envoy who outwits the entire Tang court with the help of a ghost. They left Japan in 1932, sold by an Osaka dealer through Yamanaka and Company of New York to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the sale caused a national outcry.

The timing is the point. Japan's National Treasures Preservation Law had been in force since 1 July 1929, but it protected only objects that had been designated. These scrolls had not been. On 1 April 1933, not nine months after the accession, Japan enacted a second statute to stop undesignated art leaving the country in the economic crisis, and about eight thousand objects were placed beyond export under it. The literature treats the export of these scrolls as a cause of that statute; the legislative record has not been checked here, so this record records the sequence and attributes the causal claim rather than making it.

The provenance is unusually complete for a Japanese painting of this age - a shrine in Wakasa by 1441, the Sakai lords of Wakasa, two generations of Sakai, a Tokyo Art Club auction in 1923, two generations of the Toda family in Osaka, and then Boston. A companion scroll believed to have been kept at the same shrine stayed in Japan and is a National Treasure. This one is recorded by its own museum as not on view.

What the object is

Four handscrolls of ink, colour and gold on paper, with endknobs of rosewood. The Museum of Fine Arts gives scroll one an image 32 cm high and 674.6 cm long, and scroll four an image 30.2 cm high and 648.1 cm long; mounted with endpapers each is roughly eight metres. Together the four make up something close to twenty-four and a half metres of painted narrative. The superlative of longest known scroll is applied in the reference literature to the work as a single undivided scroll, which is itself contested here.

They are read the way all emaki are read: unrolled a little at a time with the right hand while the left rolls up what has passed, so that the viewer sees about sixty centimetres at once and the story moves through the hands rather than across a wall. Passages of text alternate with the painted scenes. There is no signature and no seal.

The four scrolls are separately accessioned - 32.131.1 through 32.131.4 - and separately mounted, which is the ordinary condition for a long emaki and not evidence of damage.

The story, and why a Japanese painter told it

Kibi no Makibi was a real man, a scholar-official who went to Tang China with a Japanese embassy in the eighth century and came back carrying Chinese learning that reshaped the Japanese court. Abe no Nakamaro was also real: he went to China on the same kind of mission, rose in the Tang bureaucracy, and never came home. He died there.

The scrolls take these two and build a fantasy on them. Kibi arrives in China by boat and is escorted by Chinese officials to a tower, where he is shut up. The ghost of Abe no Nakamaro appears to him in the form of a demon, identifies himself, and offers to help. The Chinese set Kibi a series of tests designed to humiliate him: an exegesis of the Wen Xuan anthology, an examination by a Chinese scholar, and finally a game of go, with the understanding among the court officials that if he loses he will be killed. He wins the go match by supernatural means, concealing the evidence by swallowing a stone. The last scroll shows the Chinese emperor being told that the Japanese minister has won.

This is a national fantasy of intellectual superiority, painted in the twelfth century about the eighth. It matters that by then Japan had not sent an official embassy to China for nearly three hundred years; the missions were discontinued in 894. The scrolls are not a report from a relationship, they are a story told long after the relationship lapsed, and the pleasure they take in beating Chinese scholars at Chinese learning is the pleasure of a culture that has decided it no longer needs the teacher.

The ghost is the doctrine

The helper in this story is not a god and not a Buddhist protector. It is Abe no Nakamaro, a Japanese man who died in a foreign country, and he appears as an oni, a demon.

That is not decorative. In the belief system this painting was made inside, a person who dies away from home, without the proper rites performed by their own people at the proper place, does not settle. The unquiet dead of the Heian imagination are precisely the ones who died wrongly, in exile, in disgrace or abroad - the same logic that produced the cult of Sugawara no Michizane, exiled to Kyushu and afterwards placated as a god because his angry spirit was held to be causing disasters in the capital. Nakamaro's demonic form is a statement about what happened to him, not a costume.

It also produces the moral joke at the heart of the scrolls. The Japanese envoy is saved from the Chinese by another Japanese envoy whom China kept. The instrument of the victory over China is the man China would not let go home.

The attribution fight

The Museum of Fine Arts catalogues these scrolls as by an unknown Japanese artist. The traditional attribution, still repeated in popular sources, is to Tokiwa Mitsunaga, the painter given the Ban Dainagon Ekotoba, and it is easy to see why the two names became attached: the two works are believed to have been kept at the same Hachiman shrine in Wakasa Province, and they are close in date and in manner of narrative.

Art historians treat the identification as questionable, on the ground of stylistic variation between the two works, and place the painter of the Kibi scrolls instead as an unnamed artist of the capital, a contemporary of Mitsunaga rather than Mitsunaga himself.

The disagreement is worth stating cleanly because of what hangs on it. If the two scrolls are by one hand, the Kibi set is by the painter of a designated National Treasure and its export in 1932 becomes an even sharper loss. If they are not, then the strongest thing linking them is a shared shrine, which is a provenance fact rather than a stylistic one. This record follows the holding museum and treats the attribution as open.

Every owner named, over five hundred years

The Museum of Fine Arts publishes a provenance for these scrolls that is far fuller than the norm for Japanese painting of this age, and it rests on research published in the museum's own Bulletin by Robert T. Paine Jr. in February 1933, within months of the acquisition.

By 1441 the scrolls were at the Oshio Hachiman Shrine in Wakasa Province, now Fukui Prefecture. They were probably acquired from the shrine by the Sakai family, the lords of Wakasa, and passed to Sakai Tadamichi, who died in 1920, and then to his son Sakai Tadatae, born 1883 and died 1939. In 1923 Sakai Tadatae sold them at auction at the Tokyo Art Club to Toda Yashichi the second, of Osaka, born 1867 and died 1930, and they passed to his son Toda Yashichi the third, known as Toda Rosui, a dealer, born 1892 and died 1942. In 1932 Toda Rosui sold them through Yamanaka and Company of New York to the Museum of Fine Arts. The accession date is 7 July 1932.

Two things in that chain deserve to be pulled out. The first is 1923: a daimyo family selling its heirlooms at auction in Tokyo. The old peerage was under sustained financial pressure after the First World War, and the scrolls moved from an aristocratic house into the trade at exactly the point when Japanese aristocratic collections were being broken up. The second is Yamanaka and Company, the Osaka firm with branches in New York, Boston, London and Peking that was the principal conduit for East Asian art into American collections in this period. This was not a private accident. It was the pipeline working as designed.

The one-year gap in Japanese law

The outrage in Japan at the 1932 sale is documented, and the legislative response is documented, and the relationship between them is the single most useful fact on this page.

Japan already had an export control. The National Treasures Preservation Law came into force on 1 July 1929, replacing legislation of 1897, and it extended protection to objects in public and private institutions and in private hands specifically in order to prevent the export or removal of cultural properties. Its limitation is the one every designation regime has: it protected what had been designated. These scrolls had not been.

On 1 April 1933, Japan enacted the Law Regarding the Preservation of Important Works of Fine Arts, created to prevent art objects that had not been designated from being exported under the pressure of the economic crisis. It offered a simpler and faster designation procedure and a temporary protection that included export control. Roughly eight thousand objects across nine categories were brought under it and forbidden to be exported.

The scrolls left in the window. Sold in 1932, accessioned in Boston on 7 July 1932, and by 1 April 1933 the category of thing they were had been closed. The reference literature treats the outcry at this sale as a cause of the 1933 statute; that causal chain is asserted there and has not been checked here against the legislative record, so it is reported as an attribution and not as a finding. What can be stated without qualification is the sequence, and that the export was lawful under Japanese law as it stood. No restitution claim has ever been made, and this record does not offer a reason for that.

The sibling that stayed

The Ban Dainagon Ekotoba is a late twelfth-century emaki attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga, with calligraphy attributed to Fujiwara Norinaga, telling the story of a conspiracy and an arson at the Otenmon gate. It is believed to have been kept at the same Wakasa shrine as the Kibi scrolls.

It did not leave Japan. It is a designated National Treasure and it is in the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo.

Two works of the same date, the same tradition and, on the traditional attribution, the same hand, held for centuries in one provincial shrine. One is a National Treasure in Tokyo. The other is in Boston, recorded by its own museum as not on view. Nothing separates their fates except which of them a dealer was able to move before April 1933.

What it cost, and what nobody has published

The Museum of Fine Arts does not publish a purchase price. Its credit line records the mechanism instead: museum purchase with funds by exchange from the William Sturgis Bigelow Collection. That is a museum selling or trading part of an existing holding to fund a new acquisition, and it means the true cost of these scrolls to Boston was paid partly in other Japanese objects rather than in cash.

Which objects were exchanged, and to whom, is not stated. That is a real gap and it is unusually consequential here, because Bigelow's collection was itself assembled in Japan in the 1880s under conditions that would not be repeated, and anything traded out of it in the early 1930s entered the market from a source of the highest quality.

The 1923 hammer price at the Tokyo Art Club is also unpublished in the sources consulted. There is therefore no price anywhere in this object's five-hundred-year documented history: not the shrine, not the Sakai transfer, not the 1923 auction, not the 1932 sale. The chain of custody is one of the best of its kind and the financial record is empty.

Where it is now

The Museum of Fine Arts records all four scrolls as not on view. The scrolls are included in the museum's own Japanese Masterpieces catalogue of 2012 and in its Arts of Japan highlights volume of 2008, so they are published and acknowledged as among the strongest things it owns.

An emaki cannot be displayed continuously. Light damages pigment and paper, and a twenty-four-metre object can only be shown in sections in any case, so rotation and long periods in storage are ordinary conservation practice rather than neglect. That said, the practical situation is worth stating for anyone planning to see them: the work whose export changed Japanese law is, in the normal course, not on a wall anywhere.