Author: Setsuzan Kitajima
Early Edo period (17C)
Setsuzan Kitajima (1636-1697) was a calligrapher and Yang Ming scholar (Yangmingism or Neo-Confucianism was based on the teachings of Wang Yangming and his followers), who learned the Chinese calligraphy of Wen Zhengming and others directly from the Obaku sect monks Dokuryū Shōeki and Sokuhi Nyōichi, and is considered a pioneer of Tang Dynasty-style calligraphy in Japan.
What you see here is a ‘Gakushi-ron’, which translates roughly as a Philology Essay, featuring a mixture of running and cursive scripts in the style of Zhong Changtong, a scholar of the later Han Dynasty in China. In 1877, it was presented to Kyunai Yamanouchi, a former samurai of the Shonai Clan, then mayor of Fukuyama Town in the district of Matsumae, by Sugiura Baitan, a former vassal of the Tokugawa Shogunate, who had resigned from his post as a pioneer judge in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.