What are mokkan (木簡)?
— write, shave it off, write again, throw it away

Meaning

Mokkan are thin strips of wood written on in ink.

In an age when paper was precious, the daily business of government was conducted on wood: tags tied to goods, notes about duty, rosters, practice exercises.

How it worked

• Shaped and written on — a thin board was prepared and written on in ink.
• Shaved and corrected — a mistake was scraped off with a small knife and written over. The shavings, kezurikuzu, are themselves excavated in great quantity.
• Discarded — once the business was done, the strip was thrown away. Because it was thrown away and buried, it can be read thirteen centuries later.

They survive because they were thrown away

These were not treasured objects. They were the board you no longer need once the day's business is over. So what is written on them is not doctrine or policy but the errand of the day.

On a shaving excavated from the southeast corner of the Nara palace grounds, three characters remain:

病不参 — "Ill; not reporting."

A civil servant's sick note from thirteen hundred years ago, surviving exactly as written. Being discarded is the reason they survive.

Fragments where this word appears

• The wooden tablets of Heijō-kyō (a notice for a lost horse; a three-character sick note, and more) — ep. #009

(The detailed page for this fragment is not yet available in English. As more fragments written on wood join the archive, they will be added here.)

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