Shikishi-naishinnō

Who They Were

Shikishi-naishinnō (式子内親王, しょくし ないしんのう) was a Japanese princess and one of the most admired poets of the classical tradition. She was born in 1149, the third daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, and died on 1 March 1201. Her life spanned the last decades of the Heian period (794–1185) and the opening years of the Kamakura period that followed.

She never married. Instead she entered religious service at the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto, and in her later years she took Buddhist vows as a nun. Her reputation rests on her poetry: she is counted among the Thirty-Six Immortal Women Poets, a grouping of celebrated female writers of waka (和歌, わか), the 31-syllable court poem that was the central literary form of premodern Japan.

Life and Career

Shikishi was born in 1149, in the fifth year of the Kyūan era (久安, きゅうあん). Her father was Emperor Go-Shirakawa; her mother was Fujiwara no Seishi. As a princess of the imperial house, her career followed a path set by ritual rather than marriage.

In 1159, at about the age of ten, she entered service as a saiin (斎院, さいいん) at the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto. The saiin was an unmarried imperial princess who served as the shrine's high priestess, a role that bound the imperial family to the protection of the capital. She held the post for some years and then left it. In her later years she became a Buddhist nun.

Her poetic output was substantial and highly placed. Forty-nine of her poems were included in the Shinkokinshū (新古今集, しんこきんしゅう), the great imperial anthology compiled in the early Kamakura period and containing roughly two thousand poems. Others appear in the Senzai Wakashū (千載和歌集, せんざいわかしゅう), the anthology compiled in the late Heian period to mark her father's ascension, and in later collections.

Why They Matter

The Shinkokinshū was the most ambitious of the imperial anthologies, and forty-nine poems is a large share of it for a single poet. That number places Shikishi among the anthology's principal voices, in a company dominated by figures such as the priest Saigyō and the compiler Fujiwara no Teika.

Her standing is also institutional. Inclusion among the Thirty-Six Immortal Women Poets fixed her name in the canon of classical Japanese verse, a canon that later centuries treated as the foundation of the language's literary history. For a princess who never married and spent part of her life in shrine service and part as a nun, the poems were the career.

She is a bridge figure between two eras. She was born into the late Heian court and died in 1201, after the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate had shifted political power away from Kyoto. Her work belongs to the moment when that older court culture produced its most refined and self-conscious poetry.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 式子内親王. It is read しょくし ないしんのう in kana, and romanised as Shikishi Naishinnō or Shokushi Naishinnō — both readings of the first two characters are on-yomi, the Sino-Japanese readings borrowed from Chinese.

Breaking it down character by character:

• 式 — read here as shiki (or shoku). It means "form," "pattern," "ceremony," or "ritual." This is the character used in words for formal ceremony and for mathematical formulae.
• 子 — read here as shi. It means "child." It is one of the most common closing characters in Japanese female given names, and in that position it is usually read ko.
• 内 — read here as nai. It means "inside" or "within." In this compound it signals the palace interior, the private precincts of the imperial court.
• 親 — read here as shin. It means "parent," "close," or "intimate." Combined with the next character it forms the word for a close imperial relative.
• 王 — read here as nō. It means "king" or "prince." It is the character used for members of a royal or imperial house.

The last two characters together, 親王 (しんのう, shinnō), mean "imperial prince." The title 内親王 (ないしんのう, naishinnō) is the female equivalent and translates as "Imperial Princess" — a princess of the blood, born to an emperor. The 内 at the front distinguishes the daughters of an emperor from other ranks of princess. So the full name means, roughly, "Imperial Princess Shikishi."

The same characters appear in modern given names with different readings. Shikiko mixes the on-yomi shiki with the kun-yomi ko, the native Japanese reading of 子. Noriko uses the pure kun-yomi reading nori for 式 alongside ko. The princess's own name keeps the older, fully Sino-Japanese pronunciation.

Legacy

Shikishi's poems continued to be copied, anthologised and commented on long after her death in 1201. Her presence in the Shinkokinshū and the Senzai Wakashū ensured that later poets encountered her work as part of the standard repertoire they were expected to know.

The image of the princess-poet who served at the Kamo Shrine and then withdrew to a nun's life became one of the enduring figures of classical Japanese literature. She is remembered alongside the other women of the Thirty-Six Immortal Poets as evidence that the waka tradition's most accomplished practitioners were often women of the court.

Her name survives in two accepted readings, Shikishi and Shokushi, a reminder that the same written characters can carry more than one Sino-Japanese pronunciation. Both are used today in reference to her and to her poems.