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Hitachinokuni Soshagu Shrine and Osamu Tezuka
The Soja Shrine in Tokiwa Province is located in Ishioka City, Ibaraki Prefecture. Soja shrines were used in ancient times by the Yamato court’s administrative officials, the kokushi, who made pilgrimages to shrines in the country they ruled, starting with the first shrine, but to make this more efficient, they were combined with other deities in the country to perform rituals together.
Ishioka City is a regional city of 70 000 inhabitants located in the south of Ibaraki Prefecture, 50 minutes from central Tokyo by car via the Joban Expressway and 50 minutes by train on the JR Joban Line express.
Ishioka City was known as the Matsudaira Fuchu clan, a branch of the neighbouring Mito clan, one of the Three Families in the Edo period, and as Ishioka alone was just short of the 10,000 koku stipend required to be called a feudal lord, it was combined with a 10,000 koku estate in Mutsu Province to form a 20,000 koku clan.
A doctor in this clan at the end of the Edo period was Tezuka Ryosen (Tezuka Mitsuteru), who was a manga artist and the author of Black Jack
Tezuka Osamu, who drew Black Jack, The Firebird, Astro Boy, etc., is the great-grandfather of Tezuka Osamu, whose manga The Sunshine Tree also features Ryosen as the protagonist.
The manga, in eight volumes, is one of the masterpieces of Tezuka’s later works depicting the turbulent period at the end of the Edo period.
Because of this connection, the shrine sells red seal books featuring Tezuka’s works and has a huge picture horse drawn by Tezuka Osamu in front of the shrine.
The shrine also contains a stone on which Emperor Yamatotakeru no Mikoto, prince of the 12th Emperor Keiko, is said to have sat during his eastern expedition.
Yamatotakeru’s Journey
Yamatotakeru no Mikoto (Yamatotakeru no Mikoto, Nihon no Musun) Yamatotakeru is an ancient hero from the Kojiki and Nihonshoki, and is regarded as a prince who fought eastward and westward to unify the archipelago by the Yamato regime (also called Yamato Imperial Court).
He was ordered by his father, Emperor Keiko, to defeat the Kumaso in Kyushu and then the Emishi in the north-east, as described in ‘Kaido yuku – Hisatsu no michi’. The above-mentioned stone on which Emperor Yamatotakeru sat is said to have been a stopover during his eastern expedition.
Yamatotakeru left behind various legends. For example, the episode of him defeating the Kumaso Takeru brothers in women’s clothing during his western expedition is depicted in the Yamato version of Osamu Tezuka’s lifework, ‘Firebird’,
At Ise Shrine, he was given the Amemurakumo no Tsurugi, the legendary sacred weapon that vanquished the Yamatano-orochi, as described in ‘Kaido yuku Inaba Hoki no Michi’. The sword is also called Kusanagi no Tsurugi (Sword of Kusanagi).
Incidentally, the Kusanagi Sword became one of the three sacred weapons (Yata no Kagami, Ama-no-Murakumo Sword (Kusanagi Sword) and Yasakani no Magatama) as the Emperor’s regalia, but as described in ‘Kaido yuku – Choshu Road’, it sank into the Shimonoseki Sea with Emperor Antoku during the Genpei War.
Other episodes include the crossing between the Miura Peninsula and Chiba by boat (a route similar to the Tokyo Bay Ferry connecting present-day Kurihama to Kanaya in Chiba), as described in ‘Kaido yuku – Miura Peninsula Ki’, where the Empress Ototachibanahime no Mikoto offered her life to the sea in order to calm the raging sea. Yamatotakeru was saddened by this event and called the eastern part of the country Azuma-no-kuni, meaning ‘my wife’, which in turn led to the name Azuma-no-kuni.
At the end of his journey, he threatened a white boar, an incarnation of a deity, on Mount Ibuki in Shiga Prefecture, as described in ‘On the Road – Kosai’s Roads, History and Ironman Races’, and the deity became angry and lost his strength.
After Yamatotakeru’s death, his spirit is said to have turned into a swan and flown away, and this legend is also passed down as the Swan Legend.
In Kameyama City in Mie Prefecture, there is a tomb of Yamatotakeru called Kumamono Onbo, and there are also tombs of Yamatotakeru in Kotodama in Yamato (Nara Prefecture), where Yamatotakeru is said to have alighted as a swan, and Furuichi in Kawachi (Osaka Prefecture), mentioned in ‘Kaido yuku – Kawachi no michi’. The tomb of Yamatotakeru, Misasagi, also remains in Furuichi in Kawachi (Osaka Prefecture), which is mentioned in ‘Kaido yuku – Michi in Kawachi’.
Thus, Yamatotakeru was the hero of a tragic drama in which he traversed and pacified almost all of Japan at the time, and died on his return home after completing all his work and not even becoming emperor.
The end of Yamatotakeru is also associated with the poisoning of heroes, a common pattern in Netflix’s Korean dramas, but there is a strong theory that Yamatotakeru’s father, the 12th Emperor Keiko, was an emperor of the period that connected gods and men and did not really exist, and that he also compared the military power that had pacified the archipelago to that of a man. It is also thought that Yamatotakeru may have compared the military power that pacified the archipelago to a man.
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