What Is the Hōjōki? Kamo no Chōmei's 'Account of My Hut', the River Opening and the Five Disasters

Q: What does "Hōjōki" mean?

Hōjō means a space one jō square, about ten feet on each side. In his last years Chōmei built a hut of exactly that size at Hino, on the outskirts of Kyoto, and lived there in seclusion. Because the book records what he observed of the world from that hut, he named it Hōjōki , "the record of the ten-foot-square". The last lines of the oldest manuscript give the date as the end of the third month of 1212 and sign the work with his Buddhist name, Ren'in.

Q: Is the Hōjōki a zuihitsu?

The work has been classified both as a zuihitsu , a loose "follow-the-brush" essay, and as Buddhist literature. In Japan it is counted, with Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book and Yoshida Kenkō's Essays in Idleness , as one of the three great classical essays. It is also seen as the first outstanding literary work written in a mixed style of Chinese characters and kana, and it is known as a founding work of "recluse literature". Chōmei did not write in a vacuum. Scholars point to the strong influence of Chiteiki (982), an essay by Yoshishige no Yasutane about his own retreat, and he modeled his hut and much of his outlook on the Indian sage Vimalakīrti.

Written in 1212 by a hermit in a ten-foot-square hut, the Hōjōki is Japan's classic essay on impermanence. What it says and the disasters it records.

The Hōjōki, usually translated as An Account of My Hut or The Ten Foot Square Hut, is a short work written in March 1212 by Kamo no Chōmei, a former court poet who became a Buddhist recluse. Through his memories of fire, whirlwind, a sudden move of the capital, famine and earthquake in Kyoto, it expresses the Buddhist idea of impermanence (mujō), and it ends with a portrait of the author's simple life in a tiny hut on Mount Hino. It is still part of the Japanese school curriculum.

The famous opening: the flowing river

Almost everyone in Japan can recite the first line. In Chōmei's words, the current of a flowing river never stops, and yet the water is never the same water as before; the foam on still pools vanishes and forms again and never lasts long, and so it is with the people and dwellings of the world. The image invites comparison with the saying panta rhei, "everything flows", attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who also used a changing river.

After this opening, the book describes how fragile things are, then turns to the disasters of the author's own time, and in the second half moves to his life in a grass hut. That structure is simple: first the world, then the self.

What does "Hōjōki" mean?

Hōjō means a space one jō square, about ten feet on each side. In his last years Chōmei built a hut of exactly that size at Hino, on the outskirts of Kyoto, and lived there in seclusion. Because the book records what he observed of the world from that hut, he named it Hōjōki, "the record of the ten-foot-square". The last lines of the oldest manuscript give the date as the end of the third month of 1212 and sign the work with his Buddhist name, Ren'in.

The five disasters described in the Hōjōki

The middle of the book is a record of catastrophes Chōmei saw with his own eyes, and historians still use it as a source.

The great fire of 1177. A fire that began at an inn for dancers in the southeast of the capital spread northwest overnight and burned the Suzaku Gate, the Great Hall of State and government ministries. About a third of the city was lost.
The whirlwind of 1180. A great whirlwind tore through the city, flattening houses or leaving only their posts and beams, and throwing boards and shingles into the sky like winter leaves.
The move to Fukuhara in 1180. The capital was suddenly moved to Fukuhara, near modern Kobe. Buildings in Kyoto were dismantled and floated downriver to the new site, but Fukuhara was too cramped for proper streets, and the capital moved back to Kyoto that winter.
The Yōwa famine of 1181–1182. Drought, storms and floods ruined two years of harvests, and the famine turned into an epidemic. A priest of Ninna-ji, Ryūgyō, marked the foreheads of the dead with a sacred letter to link them to the Buddha, and counted more than 42,300 bodies in the eastern half of the capital alone during the fourth and fifth months of 1182.
The great earthquake of 1185. Mountains collapsed and blocked rivers, the sea tilted and flooded the land, and aftershocks continued for about three months.

Chōmei's descriptions are vivid and sometimes almost unbearable. In the famine section he writes of a small child who, not knowing that his mother was dead, lay beside her and kept trying to nurse.

Life in the ten-foot-square hut

After the disasters, Chōmei turns to himself. He inherited his paternal grandmother's house but later could no longer live there, and at about fifty he left home and withdrew from the world. He was unmarried, had no children and no income. After five years at Ōhara, he built his final dwelling, only ten feet square and seven feet high, designed so that it could easily be taken apart and moved.

Inside, he kept a shelf for offerings, bamboo shelves holding Japanese poetry, and a painting of the Buddha Amitābha. He became good friends with the young son of the mountain caretaker, despite a fifty-year age gap, and the two walked the hills together. He rested his body when it was tired and worked it when he felt strong, and he no longer cared how he looked to others.

The book does not end in simple contentment, though. In its last pages Chōmei turns his critical eye on himself and asks whether even his attachment to this quiet hut is an obstacle to enlightenment. That final self-questioning is what lifts the Hōjōki above a pleasant essay on the simple life.

Who was Kamo no Chōmei?

Kamo no Chōmei (1153 or 1155–1216) was the second son of a high-ranking priest of the Lower Kamo (Shimogamo) Shrine in Kyoto. He studied poetry and music from an early age. When his father died in the early 1170s, the young Chōmei was passed over for his father's post, and a cousin was promoted instead.

He built a career as a waka poet, and in 1201 he was appointed to the Bureau of Poetry. In 1204 he hoped to become a priest at the Kawai Shrine, but a rival in the shrine blocked his appointment despite the support of the retired emperor Go-Toba. After that, Chōmei took Buddhist vows. He was also an accomplished player of the biwa lute and the koto. Besides the Hōjōki, he wrote a book on poetry, Mumyōshō, and a collection of Buddhist tales, Hosshinshū.

Is the Hōjōki a zuihitsu?

The work has been classified both as a zuihitsu, a loose "follow-the-brush" essay, and as Buddhist literature. In Japan it is counted, with Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book and Yoshida Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, as one of the three great classical essays. It is also seen as the first outstanding literary work written in a mixed style of Chinese characters and kana, and it is known as a founding work of "recluse literature".

Chōmei did not write in a vacuum. Scholars point to the strong influence of Chiteiki (982), an essay by Yoshishige no Yasutane about his own retreat, and he modeled his hut and much of his outlook on the Indian sage Vimalakīrti.

How the Hōjōki reached English readers

The Hōjōki was one of the first Japanese classics to reach Western readers. The first English translation was made in 1891 by Natsume Sōseki, later one of Japan's great novelists, at the request of his professor at Tokyo Imperial University, James Main Dixon. Later translators include William George Aston and Minakata Kumagusu, and modern versions appeared in 1998, 2014 and 2020. Because it is short, it is one of the easiest Japanese classics to read in a single evening.

Learn English with the Hōjōki

Expression	Meaning	Example
nothing lasts forever	everything changes or ends	Chōmei's river shows that nothing lasts forever.
go with the flow	accept what happens calmly	In his hut, he learned to go with the flow.
turn your back on the world	leave society behind	At fifty he turned his back on the world.
less is more	a simpler thing can be better	His tiny hut proves that less is more.
in the blink of an eye	very quickly	The fire destroyed the city in the blink of an eye.

Practice: Write three sentences about a time something changed suddenly in your life, using "nothing lasts forever" and "in the blink of an eye". Then describe your own "ten-foot-square" space in one sentence.