Fusuma shitabari monjo

• Japanese: 襖下張り文書 (fusuma shitabari monjo)

Fusuma shitabari monjo, or "documents from the under-layers of sliding screens," are historical documents found having been torn up and re-purposed as part of the underlining or insulating inner layers of fusuma (sliding screens). Though extremely few of these documents have been thoroughly researched, it is believed that a great wealth of them may exist in homes and other collections throughout Japan, anywhere that fusuma of sufficient age have been preserved.

While official documents - government records, official letters to or from governing entities - are less likely to have been used in this way, family documents, including ephemera such as personal memos, cost tabulations, receipts or the like, written, essentially, on "scrap paper," were often re-purposed in this manner.

An example of such documents is seen in the fusuma documents discovered in the homes of the Tokikuni family of Noto province; documents found in the lining of the family's fusuma, including product lists and shipping receipts, indicated that the family owned and operated several kitamaebune - the largest, top class of merchant shipping vessels, which would have carried goods along at least some portion of a great trading route from Ezo (Hokkaidô) along the Sea of Japan coast, and then into the Inland Sea, eventually transmitting those northern products to Osaka. While the Tokikuni family's storehouse of records is particularly extensive, none of the thousands of documents officially and intentionally preserved by the family "directly substantiated the existence of these ships" in the Tokikuni merchant fleet.

The fusuma documents of another family, the Inoike family of Sosogi, have also been recovered, and organized, but not yet studied. These documents - and the fusuma they were found in - are more or less all that survives of the family's history, after a member of the family took the fusuma with her as part of her dowry when she married into another family, sometime after which the Inoike ancestral home was destroyed by fire.

References

• Amino Yoshihiko, Alan Christy (trans.), Rethinking Japanese History, University of Michigan (2012), 27-28.