Introduction
In July 26, 2026, I visited a special exhibition of Shino-ryū kōdō, the Shino school of the Way of Incense, held at Hakusasonsō, the Hashimoto Kansetsu Memorial Museum, close to Ginkaku-ji in Kyoto. Its title was “The Orthodox Way of Incense — Shino-ryū: Five and a Half Centuries, a Bloodline of One-to-One Transmission.” The exhibition marked the succession of the twenty-first-generation head of the school, the Iemoto, and it offered the rare chance to hear the Iemoto himself speak about the tradition. The opportunity came to me through a friend, the artist Miyake Mai, and Yohaku, the otona no terakoya — a “temple school for grown-ups” — that she hosts.
On display were the incense implements that successive Iemoto have guarded and handed down across the generations: hanging scrolls and calligraphy by past masters, an Edo-period register of disciples, even raw blocks of fragrant wood. There stood the celadon incense burner “Aoyagi,” said to have belonged to Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436 – 1490), and the sixty-one famous incenses, among them the storied Ranjatai. Standing before them as the commentary unfolded, one could almost feel the weight of five and a half centuries made tangible through the objects themselves.
Incense, Tea, and Noh, Resonating Within the Register List
What drew me most was the monjinchō, the register list of disciples. Following the names down the list, people connected to the tea ceremony and to Noh begin to appear. It conveys how incense, tea, and Noh were practiced as one continuous fabric, within the same circle of people.
My own paternal grandfather was a Noh performer who lived in Nagoya, and he practiced tea as well; his home, I am told, had its own Noh stage. I have some experience of the tea ceremony myself. So this register felt less like a distant historical record than a document brushing against my own lineage. Incense, tea, and Noh may look like separate arts, but they branch in fact from a single root. What they share is that each is a culture received through the body. Rather than being grasped by the intellect, they are learned by repeating the forms, honing the senses, and letting the practice come to dwell in the body itself. I felt that I, too, faintly belong to that lineage.
What the First Iemoto, Shino Sōshin, Built
The history of incense itself runs deep. According to the Nihon Shoki, Japan’s incense culture opens in 595 — the third year of Empress Suiko — when a piece of fragrant wood drifted ashore on Awaji Island. Incense was thereafter prized within Buddhist ritual, and by the Heian period aristocrats were blending fragrances and using them, alongside wakapoetry, as a means of expressing themselves.
It was in the Muromachi period that incense was organized into a “Way.” The founding of kōdō in fact falls at almost the same moment as that of the tea ceremony. Around the time the Ōnin War had thrown the world into disorder, the foundations of kōdō were shaped at Jishō-ji — Ginkaku, the Silver Pavilion — in Higashiyama, by Shino Sōshin (1443–1523), a cultural attendant (dōbōshū) to the eighth shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa. In an age when, it is thought, hard-to-bear odors hung over the capital, a culture of turning the heart toward fragrance was born and grew.
The work Sōshin left behind still forms the backbone of kōdō. One achievement was to establish the etiquette for savoring fragrance — the form of monkō. Another was to sort, at Yoshimasa’s command, the many famous incenses handed down within the shogunal house, and from them to select and define the sixty-one famous incenses. Ranjatai, the celebrated incense said to have been received from Yoshimasa, stands at their center. And in the course of that selection, he established the rikkoku gomi — the six countries and five tastes — the standard for discerning fragrant wood. That standard of appraisal has been handed down unchanged to the present iemoto, and is still used today to judge fragrant wood.
Taking Sōshin as its founder, the Shino school has continued for five and a half centuries since — transmitted from a single master to a single heir, never once broken, through to the twenty-first generation. Until the fifteenth head, the school’s seat was in Kyoto; amid the upheavals at the close of the Edo period it found ties with the Owari Tokugawa house and moved to Nagoya. A single family, handing down an art of the senses across more than five centuries — standing before the register and the implements, I felt the weight of that fact anew.
Not “Smelling” but “Listening”
What stayed with me most deeply that day was learning that in kōdō, fragrance is not smelled but “listened to.”
Not “to catch a scent,” not “to smell,” but “to listen.” Because the fragrance of the wood is not sniffed unconsciously but savored with directed attention, the practice is called monkō — “listening to incense.” The usage is said to derive from the Chinese classic the Shujing, the Book of Documents.
Folded into this single word is a shift in one’s whole stance toward the senses. Smell is, among the five senses, an especially passive one. Draw a breath, and the scent enters whether one wills it or not. Most of the time we process it outside of awareness. Yet the moment the word “listen” is applied, fragrance turns from something that merely arrives into something one goes out to meet. From receiving to attending. An unconscious reaction becomes an object of consciousness.
Monkō, then, is the practice of deliberately turning attention toward a sensation that would ordinarily never rise into awareness. And this way of directing attention is, I think, a single backbone running through the whole of Japan’s culture of the body.
Speaking of Scent in Terms of Taste — Braiding the Five Senses into One
Within that rikkoku gomi lives yet another idea about the senses.
The “six countries,” rikkoku, divide fragrant wood — that is, jinkō, aloeswood — into six: kyara, rakoku, manaka, manaban, sumotara, and sasora. It is a classification by kidokoro, the grade of the wood, its names largely derived from places of origin. Among them, kyara is held to be something apart, called the king of fragrant woods.
The intriguing part is the “five tastes,” gomi. The quality of a fragrance is expressed through the vocabulary of taste: sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, and salty (kan). A sweetness like honey, a sourness like plum, a pungency like clove, a bitterness like phellodendron bark, a saltiness like a cloth that has wiped away sweat. A single piece of wood holds several of these tastes at once, and the strength and combination of them shape a fragrance beyond words.
What is caught by smell is “listened to” in the language of hearing and “savored” in the language of taste. Kōdō does not treat the five senses as separate windows. Rather, by braiding several senses together and translating each into the others, it manages at last to catch something too subtle for smell alone to gather. Faced with fragrance — invisible, impossible to hold — human perception can cross its own borders this freely. That discovery lies folded within the old framework of rikkoku gomi.
The Discipline of Subtraction
Kōdō is built upon paring away everything superfluous. The eyes are closed, the clutter of information set aside, and only a single thread of fragrance is left in the room. Not by adding but by subtracting, the essential rises into view.
That stance dwells even within each individual implement. In monkō, the wood is never thrown into the flame and burned. Over charcoal buried in the ash of the burner a ginyō is laid — a thin sliver of mica — and upon that, in turn, a finely split piece of fragrant wood is set. The heat of the charcoal, held off by the mica, reaches the wood gently. Not burned, but warmed. In that way the faintest layer of fragrance alone is allowed to rise, never lost within smoke. Draw off the fire, draw off the smoke, and listen to what still remains. Here too the discipline of subtraction is carried through.
This stance belongs not to kōdō alone. It breathes in the way the tea ceremony’s movements are pared of waste, and in the forms of Noh, whose motion is cut back to its very limit. Not enriching by addition but clarifying by subtraction — and then gathering the body’s whole attention upon the one point that remains at the last. What Japan’s arts have refined over long stretches of time may well be this precision of the senses, this turning toward a single point.
Where I Now Stand: Receiving Through the Body
I now work as a Rolfer, my hands on people’s bodies day after day. I gently invite them to turn their attention back toward bodily sensations that ordinarily flow past outside of awareness — how they stand, the depth of the breath, how the weight is carried. From merely “having” a body toward “listening to” it. And so I wait for a person’s own inherent order to emerge from within.
Doing this work, I could not hear the account of monkō as someone else’s story. To listen to fragrance and to listen to the body differ only in their point of entry; the faculty being cultivated is the same — the power to turn attention toward what usually slips by unnoticed, and to go out to meet it. It is surely of a piece with what my grandfather was honing in his practice of Noh and of tea. Changing in era and in form, a culture of receiving the world through the body is handed down in just this way.
The phrase “one-to-one transmission” — from a single master to a single heir — took on a new weight for me at this exhibition. That the transmission of fragrance went unbroken for five and a half centuries is surely because it was something books alone could not convey. The sense of listening to fragrance cannot be exchanged for words. Passed from master to disciple, from body to body, only then does it come to dwell in the next generation.
On the afternoon I was allowed to listen to three incenses, I felt, within that old discipline, the root of a culture I have long been close to brushing against me. To listen to incense, and to receive it through the body. Japan’s culture has gone on handing down this delicate faculty across five and a half centuries.
For anyone drawn to the world of kōdō, Hachiya Sōhitsu’s Kōdō no Seitō: Shino-ryū Kōdō no Sekai (“The Orthodox Way of Incense: The World of Shino-ryū Kōdō”) (in Japanese only) is well worth seeking out.
