Professor Emeritus Yoshinori Kobayashi, a leading researcher of the Kakuhitsu and a recipient of the Person of Cultural Merit honor, gave a special lecture at the School of Letters on July 27, 2020.

Kakuhitsu is a sharp-pointed writing tool made of wood or bamboo. It is believed that letters and symbols with small dents, written using the Kakuhitsu stylus, indicate ruby characters. In 1961, Professor Emeritus Kobayashi stumbled across a Kakuhitsu inscription among Chinese classics at an exhibition, and since then, he has discovered 3,350 writings written using the Kakuhitsu stylus, including some from China and Korea. For these achievements, he was selected as a 2019 Person of Cultural Merit Awardee.

In the special lecture, Professor Kobayashi stood on the podium and gave a lecture on the encounter with Kakuhitsu and the progress of his research to eight third-year students studying cultural properties. Afterward, the students experienced the procedure of finding letters and symbols written with the Kakuhitsu brush in old documents and archives using the Kakuhitsu-scope, which makes the letters stand out by shining light on them.

The entire session, taught by Professor Kobayashi, 91 years old, lasted over 2 hours and a half, and the students followed the characters with a keen expression. Professor Emeritus Kobayashi commented, “I hope young people will be interested in the Kakuhitsu written documents because they have been found all over the world”.

This lecture was arranged to coincide with the opening of the reference room of the Kakuhitsu Documents collected by Professor Kobayashi at the Central Library.