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Summary
Travel is an act for human beings to visit new places and experience different cultures and histories. Through travel, people can actually feel historical events and people’s lives by visiting historical places and cultural heritage sites, and can gain a deeper understanding of history and broaden their own perspectives. In this section, we will discuss the historical background of the trip and the places visited based on Ryotaro Shiba’s “Kaido yuku” (On the Road) about this journey and history.
Kaidou wo yuku Volum 15 Hokkaidou no syodou.
In the previous , I discussed the roads in Southern Iyo and Western Tosa. This time, I will discuss the roads of Hokkaido.
Hokkaido’s Roads
This trip will be to the North Sea, etc. It starts from Hakodate and Matsumae town (lower left star on the map) and finally extends over a fairly wide area to Rikubetsu town (upper right star on the map). What is different from the previous “Kaido no Yuku” is that the first half of the journey, up to the Hakodate and Matsumae area, is a history-related story, but the second half is a pure travelogue (the history of Hokkaido is shallower than that of Nara, Kyoto, and other Hanshin regions).
The journey begins with a conversation on the plane to Hakodate about the autumn foliage in the virgin forests of the Olofure Pass.
Hokkaido has deep ties with Russia. When Ryotaro Shiba visited Hakodate in the 1970s, some people actually saw the Vladivostok fleet run right in front of Hakodate during the Russo-Japanese War.
While the largest Japanese cruiser of the time was less than 10,000 tons, the above ship (named Moscow) was over 12,000 tons, and was said to have had a considerable intimidating effect on the Japanese at the time. Despite such an overwhelming difference in strength, the Japanese fleet was defeated by the Japanese fleet of which Akiyama Masayuki (one of the main characters in Ryotaro Shiba’s novel “Saka no Ue no Kumo”), a Matsuyama native, was the chief strategist, as mentioned earlier. Incidentally, the above ship remained unsinkable until after the war.
The area around Hakodate had been conquered by the Nanbu clan since around 1200, as mentioned in Mutsu-no-michi, and later invaded around 1450 by the Matsumae clan, which built Matsumae Castle near the southernmost tip of Hokkaido. Until that time, there were several armed groups from Honshu coiled around the southern area of Hokkaido, and the Ainu rose up against them, and there was a large-scale struggle led by the eastern chief Koshamain.
The Matsumae clan, which built Matsumae Castle, fought and defeated the Koshamain and further expanded its power in southern Hokkaido.
In southern Hokkaido, Hakodate was a rare good port in terms of topography, but because the land behind it was broad and inadequate for defense, the Matsumae clan remained holed up in Matsumae-cho, the tip of Hokkaido and the narrowest place closest to Honshu, for 500 years until the Meiji Restoration.
The topic next turns to Kahei Takadaya, the protagonist of the novel “Nanohana no Oki.
He was a shipping agent and sea merchant from Awaji Island in the late Edo period, and based in Hakodate, he pioneered the shipping routes between Etorofu and Kunashiri and became a merchant who made a huge fortune. A bronze statue of him stands in Hakodate City, as he contributed greatly to the development of Hakodate.
In the late Edo period when Takataya Kahei was active, Russia’s southward policy was active and Russian soldiers were apparently raiding villages in Sakhalin and Rishiri. In such a trend, a survey ship from Russia (the purpose of the ship was not to plunder but purely for surveying) was captured by the Shogunate when it landed on Etorofu Island. Captain Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin was captured at that time and escorted to Matsumae, where he was imprisoned.
He was taken to Russia, where he worked hard to mediate the Goronin issue. He had the Russian governor of Irkutsk write an official apology for the earlier outrages by the Russian soldiers, and with this letter he negotiated with the Shogunate to have Goronin released. Golonin was later released by the Russian government.
Golonin later returned to Saptopeterburg, Russia, and wrote a book titled “Nihon yuukenki” (“Japanese Prisoner of War”), which was read by Europeans at the time to develop their image of Japan. Influenced by these books, many Russian Orthodox bishops came to Japan and established churches from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period.
One of these churches was the Harist Orthodox Church in Hakodate (in Japan, it is called this way instead of Greek Orthodox Church, and “Haristos” is the Greek pronunciation of “Christ”).
After seeing the splendid decorations inside the Orthodox Church in Hakodate, the group headed for Esashi. Esashi has long been a popular place for herring fishing and is said to be the origin of herring soba (buckwheat noodles).
Ryotaro Shiba and his colleagues are not interested in herring, but in the Kaiyomaru, which sank off the coast of Esashi. The Kaiyomaru was a Dutch warship that belonged to the Shogunate’s navy at the end of the Edo period and was apparently the most advanced ship of its time.
The ship was salvaged in the mid-1970s, when Ryotaro Shiba and his colleagues were visiting Hokkaido, and is now a tourist attraction in Esashi as the Kaiyomaru Memorial Museum.
After talking about the Kaiyomaru and other topics related to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Ikkou headed toward Sapporo and proceeded to talk about the development of Hokkaido. The first names that come up are Kiyotaka Kuroda and Horace Kepron, both of whom have bronze statues on Sapporo Odori Street. Both men came to Hokkaido in the early Meiji period and laid the foundation for what Hokkaido is today.
From Sapporo, through Atsuta Village with the Loulan Coast (cliff coast)
After describing Yoshitaro Migishi, a Western-style painter from Atsuta Village (his work is shown below), and his wife, Setsuko
Furthermore, the Hokkaido trip ends with a description of Seki Kansai, a solitary doctor who single-handedly opened the town of Rikubetsu, famous for being the coldest town in Japan.
Winter in Rikubetsu Town
Rikubetsu Town is also a city of starry skies.
In the next article, we will discuss the Sakai-Kishu Kaido.
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