shoso-in

As illustrating the straits to which the metropolitans were reduced and the price they had to pay for relief, it is instructive to examine a note found among the contents of the Shoso-in at Nara. Total, 1700 Mon. Monthly interest, 15 per hundred. Debtors Sums lent Amounts to be returned

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

At the present day, strangers may visit the collection only by special permission and only on two days each year; and the museum has always had a mingled imperial and sacred character. When the power of the shogunate was at its height, the Shoso-in was never opened except by orders of the Emperor.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

At Nara, in Yamato province, near the temple of Todai-ji, a store house built of wood and called the Shoso-in was constructed in the Nara epoch, and it still stands housing a remarkable collection of furniture and ornaments from the Imperial palace.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

Nothing remains of the palace where the Court resided throughout a cycle and a half, nearly twelve hundred years ago, but one building, a storehouse called Shoso-in, survives in its primitive form and constitutes a landmark in the annals of Japanese civilization, for it contains specimens of all the articles that were in daily use by the sovereigns of the Nara epoch.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era