Shōkadō Shōjō (松花堂昭乗, 1584-1639) was an

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

Buddhist monk, painter,

calligrapher Calligraphy (from el, link=y, καλλιγραφία) is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "t ...

and master of the

tea ceremony An East Asian tea ceremony, or ''Chádào'' (), or ''Dado'' ( ko, 다도 (茶道)), is a ceremonially ritualized form of making tea (茶 ''cha'') practiced in East Asia by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The tea ceremony (), literally transla ...

. He is one of the . ''Shōjō'' is the Buddhist name the youth was given when he entered the

Hachiman shrine A is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the ''kami'' Hachiman. It is the second most numerous type of Shinto shrine after those dedicated to Inari Ōkami (see Inari shrine). There are about 44,000 Hachiman shrines. Originally the name 八幡 was re ...

on Otoko-yama (Yawata) near

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

. He later served the

Konoe family is a Japanese aristocratic family.Edmund Papinot, Papinot, Jacques Edmond Joseph. (1906). ''Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie du Japon''; Papinot, (2003)"Konoe," ''Nobiliare du Japon'', p. 24 retrieved 2013-8-13. The family is a branc ...

under

Konoe Nobutada was a Momoyama period Japanese courtier known as a poet, calligrapher, painter and diarist. Having no legitimate son, he adopted his nephew Nobuhiro as his heir. Other names he is known by are Nobumoto (信基) and Nobusuke (信輔) in his early ...

. At that time he also became acquainted with the Zen-monks of

Daitoku-ji is a Buddhist temple, one of fourteen autonomous branches of the Rinzai school of Japanese Zen. It is located in Kita-ku, Kyoto, Japan. The "mountain name" ('' sangō'') by which it is known is . The Daitoku-ji temple complex today covers more ...

. In 1627 he became the head of the small Takimoto-bō temple nearby; ten years later, he retired to a hut on the temple's estate which he called . This became the name under which he is currently best known.

References

External links

The Shokado Tea House, YawataMomoyama, Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Shōkadō Shōjō {{DEFAULTSORT:Shokado, Shojo 1584 births 1639 deaths 17th-century Japanese calligraphers Edo period Buddhist clergy