National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

The shape of the backside cloth stored separately tells that this joku was originally rectangular. This front side is a brocade with flower-bird-butterfly pattern (kachouchou-mon), and the backside is plain silk while most of joku-s in the Treasures of Horyuji uses koukechi (dyed by bound resist) plain silk. The brocade is yoko-nishiki (weft brocade, brocade with colored horizontal threads) using wefts of two different colors, featuring plump birds and small butterflies between two different flower-plant patterns (kusabana-mon). This kusabana-mon appears different from karahana　(China-flower)-mon that was popular in the middle Nara period, displaying the change of the motifs into more familiar kinds of flower-plants. The design has a specific kind of gentle touch, the kind commonly seen in Japanese art.
This joku had narrow braids, part of which has survived and is stored separately today. Among the bordered joku in Shosoin, there are some that have braids stitched onto the parts where the frame is sewn on the main body of joku (sometimes called kagami, mirror). Taking that into account, it appears that this joku was originally bordered, with those braids stitched along the parts where the main body and the frame are sewn together.