Going on the Highway Totsukawa Highway

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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.

Vol.12.Going on the Highway Totsukawa Highway

In the previous article, I described the Bin road in China. This time, I will describe a trip to Totsukawa Township, which stretches deep into the mountains of Yoshino, Nara.

The trip began in Osaka, where we took a cab southward through Tondabayashi and into the mountains of Mount Kongo, changing to a local cab at Gojo. In the mountains on the way to Totsukawa, he believes that “Totsukawa has long been exempt from taxes and escaped the restraints of the state, so that a “Totsukawa Republic” could be created, and in fact probably was, in hindsight.

At Amatsuji Pass, the entrance to Totsukawa Township, he thinks about the fate of the Tenchugumi at the end of the Edo period, and at Kamiyu, about Mitsuaki Tanaka and others who fled to Totsukawa after being chased by the Shin-Sen-Gumi. Finally, he paid a visit to Tamaki Shrine and headed for Kumano, which he called a “hidden country.” Compared to Totsukawa, Kumano “feels like a wide open field that I want to look at with my eyes.

This trip will be to Totsukawa Village, located in the southernmost part of Nara Prefecture. Totsukawa belongs to Yoshino County, famous for its cherry blossoms, and with an area of 672 km2, it is the largest village within its administrative jurisdiction in Japan. It is located in the interior of the Kii Peninsula, deep in the mountains bordering Mie and Wakayama Prefectures.

The “Inspector Totsukawa series,” well-known for its detective dramas and novels set on trains running throughout Japan, was apparently decided upon when author Kyotaro Nishimura was thinking of a name for the detective character and happened to see a map of Japan that caught his eye.

Historically, Yusuhara has existed as a half-independent village community without being ruled by the authorities of the time as a tax-exempt area since ancient times because of its mountainous terrain unsuitable for agriculture.

The story of the incident at Omiya, Kyoto, in which Ryoma Sakamoto, a famous samurai in the closing days of the Tokugawa Shogunate, was attacked and killed, as described in “The Road to Yusuhara – Kochi and the Shikoku Mountains” began with the story that the attacker said, “I am from Totsukawa Township,” which made the people on Ryoma’s side feel comfortable and allowed him to commit the murder. The story goes that the attacker said, “I am from Totsukawa Township.

In Totsukawa, they always went to war for the side of the powerful who guaranteed them the privilege of tax exemption, and in the past, they fought in the Jinshin Rebellion as described in “Kaido yuku: Sendai/Ishinomaki” the Hogen Rebellion in the late Heian period as described in “Kaido yuku: Rakuhoku Shodo to Stasta Monk, Yamabushi and Monks” and the Koya Mountain Road (Sanada Yukimura and Kukai) as described in “Kaido yuku: Koyasan-michi (Koyasan Road to Koya Mountain)” (Osaka). The “Winter Campaign” of the late Heian period, as described in the book “The Sado War,” and the Tenchugumi rebellion during the turmoil at the end of the Edo period often appear in the history of Japan.

In Ryoma Sakamoto’s time, he had built a kind of branch office in Kyoto and served as a guard at the gate of the Imperial Palace, and he was relieved when an attacker said, “I am from Totsukawa Township.

The town of Gojo is the first flat land where the mountain mass of Totsukawa Village descends into the Yamato Basin along with the mountain mass of Oto Village and Nishi-Yoshino, famous for its cherry blossoms.

Gojo was the site of the Edo period shogunate’s government office, and was the first place attacked by the Tenchugumi, an armed faction of the Emperor Exclusionist group (a faction that sought to overthrow the shogunate and establish a new government led by the emperor), led by the noble lord Tadamitsu Nakayama and composed of samurai.

The Tenchugumi was formed at Hokoji Temple in Higashiyama, Kyoto, as described in “Strolling along the Highway to Kyoto’s Famous Temples and Daitokuji Temple – Dada, Zen, and Ikkyu“. On August 17, 1863, they attacked the Gojo District Magistrate’s Office (now Gojo City, Nara Prefecture), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the shogunate, and beheaded five officials.

He then established the “Gojo Government” with Sakurai Temple near Gojo Daikanjo as its headquarters, and declared that the shogunate would no longer rule the city. Also, at the time, the political situation in Kyoto was in the hands of the Sonno Joi faction, and in order to take advantage of this opportunity to overthrow the shogunate, the Sonno Joi faction’s court nobles and Choshu clan soldiers planned one of their plans to overthrow the shogunate: a visit to Yamato (to pray for the exclusion of foreigners by Emperor Komei, for example).

However, the day after the Tenchugumi attacked the Gojo government office, a political upheaval broke out in Kyoto, and the noblemen and Choshu clan soldiers who opposed the ruling party’s exclusion of the barbarians were expelled from Kyoto due to a plan by the officialdom of the Kōbu Gappei, the Aizu clan, and the Satsuma clan. As a result, the Tenchugumi lost their cause and were chased by the Shogunate’s retaliatory forces.

The Tenchugumi then fled to Amatsuji Pass (present-day Daito-cho, Gojo City, Nara Prefecture), where they were destroyed. The Tenchugumi was the first armed uprising by the Emperor’s Exclusionist faction, and the event was only five years before the Meiji Restoration, making it a historic precursor to the Meiji Restoration, and Gojo City in Nara Prefecture is said to be the birthplace of the Meiji Restoration.

In order to follow in the footsteps of this Tenchugumi, Ryotaro Shiba and his friends change cabs in Gojo City and head for Amatsuji Pass.

Then, thinking about Mitsuaki Tanaka of the Tosa Clan, who fled to Totsukawa after being chased by the Shinsengumi, he went to Kaminyu Onsenkyo, a hot spring village in Okuyoshino with an open-air bath along the river.

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The trip ends at Tamaki Shrine, one of the components of the World Heritage Site “Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range” and a power spot for those in the know.

The temple grounds are located near the summit of Mt. Tamaki, a sacred mountain, in a deep forest of giant cedar trees over 3,000 years old. The ancient forest remains, creating a mysterious world that looks as if it could be seen in a Ghibli movie.