Kōzan-ji, a short walk from Jingō-ji in the Takao district, is a modest temple by Kyoto standards — and one with an outsized claim to fame in Japanese art history, mentioned briefly in our Kameoka & Takao guide.
The Chōjū-giga scrolls
The temple is closely associated with the Chōjū-giga ("Animal Scrolls"), a set of ink drawings, likely from the 12th and 13th centuries, depicting frogs, rabbits and monkeys engaging in playful, often satirical human activities — wrestling, bathing, mocking religious ritual. The originals are now held in museums rather than at the temple itself, but Kōzan-ji displays high-quality reproductions, and its association with the scrolls is central to how the temple is understood today.
Why they matter
The Chōjū-giga scrolls are widely cited by historians and manga scholars as an early conceptual ancestor of Japanese manga — sequential, expressive drawings using animals as stand-ins for human behaviour, with a loose, energetic drawing style that feels startlingly modern for its age.
The temple grounds
Beyond the scrolls, Kōzan-ji's grounds include Sekisui-in, a preserved building associated with Myōe, the temple's founding monk and an important figure in the introduction of tea cultivation to Japan — legend credits him with planting some of the country's first tea seeds on the temple grounds.