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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.
Kaidou wo yuku Volume 37 Hongou kaiwai
In the previous article, I described Fukagawa and Honjo neighborhoods to visit people who lived in the Edo period from steeplejacks, raftsmen of Kiba, rakugo, and so on. In this article, we will discuss Hongo, a town that served as a “switchboard” to accept Western civilization and distribute it to the provinces in Japan’s rush to modernize during the Meiji period, and where the first university in Japan was located, as well as the great writers of the Meiji period who lived in this town, including Soseki Natsume, Ogai Mori and Ichiyo Higuchi.
The route of this trip will take us to the Hongo neighborhood on the east side of the Musashino Plateau, a town of slopes with valleys of various sizes carved into the plateau. First, from Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, which was an inlet in the Jomon period, we will climb up Mukenzaka, Kiridoshizaka, and Yayoi Zaka. At the top of the plateau is the University of Tokyo. The University of Tokyo was built on the site of the former Kaga Maeda Clan residence, and while visiting the ruins of the former Kaga Maeda Clan residence, nearby residences, and temples, we will think about the great figures of the Edo period, such as Takashima Syuhan and Mogami Tokunai. We will also visit the path under the bushes on Dangozaka, the setting of novels by Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki, and the site of “Tokiwa Kai” where young Masaoka Shiki and others had already appeared. Finally, the tour will end with a visit to Sanshiro by Soseki, and while standing by Sanshiro Pond, we will think about Torahiko Terada and other chemists of the Meiji period.
Hongo was the site of a vast residence of the Maeda clan of Kaga during the Edo period (1603-1868). The Maeda clan was known as the Kaga Hyakumangoku, and was a non-Tokugawa family (a non-Tokugawa daimyo) power, far exceeding the 620,000 koku of the Sendai domain in Sendai and the 920,000 koku of the Satsuma Shimazu clan in Satsuma. For example, Fukushima Masanori, who was appointed to manage the Hiroshima domain, was forced to reduce the size of his domain by a large margin when he attempted to repair Hiroshima Castle, which had been damaged by a flood, in violation of the Samurai Laws. The Kato clan of Kiyomasa Kato, who built Kumamoto Castle, was also forced out of Kumamoto after Kiyomasa died. The Kaga Maeda clan was one of the feudal lords who withstood such exclusion and survived until the end of the Edo period. Hideto Ueda‘s “Hyakumangoku no Rumuyo” is an excellent work depicting such a battle for survival of the Kaga Maeda clan.
The Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo was built on the site of the former residence of the Kaga Maeda clan, and the famous Akamon gate is also the gate of the Kaga residence.
The Hongo campus is vast, covering an area of 561,351 ㎡ (5% of the total area of Bunkyo-ku, where the Hongo campus is located), with a lot of greenery (about 10% of the total green area of Bunkyo-ku) and many historical buildings inside, including the Yasuda Auditorium.
The Kaga Domain (Ishikawa Prefecture) is also famous for Kutani ware. In the Edo period (1603-1867), when high-quality pottery stones were found in the village of Kutani in the Daishoji domain, a branch of the Kaga domain, Saijiro Goto, a samurai of the domain, went to Arita to learn pottery skills and started Kutani ware as part of the domain’s policy to increase production, This is how it has remained to the present day.
This early Kutani ware is called “Ko-Kutani.” Kutani is characterized by darker glaze colors and more powerful painting than other colored porcelains, but Ko-Kutani has a particularly powerful and unique charm, and because of the short period during which it was made, the number of surviving pieces is small and highly valued as a rarity.
Such Ko-kutani were apparently also excavated from a survey of the ruins of the Kaga Maeda Clan‘s residence in Hongo.
Hongo was also the setting for novels by great writers of the Meiji era, such as Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki. In those novels, Mori Ogai‘s “Dango Zaka” and Natsume Soseki‘s “Sanshiro” appeared, which is said to have been a crossover setting in the modern sense of the word.
Soseki Natsume, who had studied in London at the government expense in 1900, was nervous about his unfamiliar life as a foreign student. It is well known that what saved Natsume Soseki, even temporarily, from the depression of his time in London was a conversation he had with Kikunae Ikeda, a scientist who was staying in England. Ikeda Kikunae was a physical chemist who used physics theory and experiments to study the structure of matter and chemical reactions, etc. He was born in 1864 as the second son of a samurai of the Satsuma domain.
Soseki spoke highly of Ikeda, saying, “Ikeda-kun is a man of science, but I was surprised to learn that he is a great philosopher. Kikunae clearly sensed the delicious taste of meat and fish from kombu (kelp) and bonito broth, and spent a year extracting the substance (glutamic acid) from the kelp that gave the taste. Since glutamic acid alone is weakly acidic and acidic, he added sodium to neutralize it and obtained a patent for a method of producing monosodium glutamate (MSG), not from kelp but from wheat flour and other proteins. This became the umami seasoning “AJI-NO-MOTO“.
The address written in the patent application was Komagome-Akebono-cho, Hongo-ku, Tokyo. The four basic tastes of taste are sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, but Kikunae‘s discovery of “umami” in addition to these four tastes was also a novelty. Incidentally, although cells corresponding to the above-mentioned four tastes had been found in the taste cells of the tongue, no cells corresponding to umami had been found, and therefore the five tastes had not been proven. It is said that in 2000, U.S. researchers discovered receptors that respond to glutamate, finally demonstrating the five basic tastes.
Ten years after Shintaro Kodama, a disciple of Kikunae, discovered that inosinic acid was responsible for the umami of Katsuobushi and presented his findings at an academic conference, Akira Kuninaka of Yamasa Soy Sauce identified the inosinic acid that gives umami among the three types, and when he licked the inosinic acid and MSG in that order, “umami exploded in the mouth”. The result is Yamasa Flavor, a compound flavor enhancer.
Let us return to Hongo. Turning south from Dango Hill in Hongodai, follow the path on the cliff (Yabushita no Michi) to Nezu Uramonzaka, where you will find Nezu Shrine halfway up the hill. This Nezu Shrine was not located here until the middle of the Edo period (1603-1868), when it was moved to Sendagi by the shogunate.
Nezu Shrine is famous for its azaleas, and every April during the azalea season, the shrine becomes one of the most popular flower spots in Tokyo, with 3,000 azalea plants of about 100 varieties in full bloom.
Yushima Tenmangu Shrine is located on the opposite side of Tokyo University from Nezu Shrine. Tenmangu shrines are dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane and are located throughout Japan, including Kyoto (Kitano Tenmangu Shrine), Osaka, Suo (Hofu Tenmangu Shrine), and Fukuoka (Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine). All of the shrines are characterized by their flamboyance, and Yushima Tenmangu Shrine is equally flamboyant, but it is said to be more colorful and glamorous than other Tenmangu shrines, perhaps because of the presence of Okabasho in front of its gate during the Edo period (1603-1868).
Hongo is a plateau, and the road to the torii of Yushima Tenjin Shrine is flat, but the northern exit is down a slope that includes a couple’s slope, Ishizaka (Tenma Otoko Zaka), and Onnazaka (Women’s Slope).
The Hongo neighborhood will be the site of many other monuments to great writers of the Meiji era, including Shoyo Tsubouchi and Shiki Masaoka.
Tokyo will be a city filled with various histories and cultures.
In the next article, I will describe a trip to the islands of Hizen in Kyushu (Karatsu, Hirado, Sasebo, and Nagasaki) to visit the remains of the Nanban trade with the Netherland, United Kingdom, and Portuguese during the Age of Discovery.
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