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Ishikawa Jozan
(b Izumi, Hekikai district, Mikawa Prov. [now Aichi Prefect.], 1583; d Kyoto, 1672). Japanese poet and calligrapher of the early Edo period (1600–1868). He was the son of a samurai named Shinjo. Both his father and grandfather were retainers of the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu (1542–1616), and from his youth Jozan was an attendant to Ieyasu and joined him in battle. Having, however, violated the command of military leaders during the Summer Battle of Osaka in 1615, he forfeited his fief and went to Kyoto where he took the tonsure. He studied Confucianism with Fujiwara no Seika (1561–1619) and at the same time, on his mother’s behalf, entered the service of a daimyo. After his mother’s death in 1641, Jozan constructed a dwelling called Ototsuka (‘roughness or jaggedness cave’) at the temple Ichijoji in Kyoto, where he led the life of a recluse. The building reflected the current Japanese taste for rusticity in architecture but was embellished by its creator with a number of Chinese touches, including a second-storey ‘moon-viewing room’. Jozan commissioned the artist Kano Tan’yu (see KANO, (11)) to paint portraits of the Sanju rokushisen (‘Thirty-six immortal Chinese poets’) of the Han (206 BC–AD 220) to Song (AD 960–1279) periods, whom he selected with his friend Hayashi Razan (1583–1657); the work was in imitation of the Sanjurokkasen (‘Thirty-six Japanese immortal poets’). On each of the portraits, Jozan inscribed one of the poet’s own works in clerical script (reisho). The works were hung in a room, which was roofed with horizontal timbers and named the Shisendo (Hall of Poetic Immortal Poets).
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