On the Road – Koshu Kaido and the Edo Shogunate

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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.

Form Vol 1. In Java , I described the Takeuchi Kaido. In this article, I will discuss the Koshu Kaido and the Edo Shogunate.

Koshu Kaido and the Edo Shogunate

This time, the stage shifts to the Kanto region and we head for Hachioji along the Koshu-kaido highway. Historical episodes of the area include the vastness of Musashino as recited by Ota Dokan, the Bando people mentioned in the Sarashina Nikki, the story of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu‘s companionship, the Hachioji Sen-nin Doshin and Isamu Kondo, and finally Tokugawa Yoshinobu, who is mentioned.

The story begins with the country of Musashi and Ota Dokan.

Ota Dōkan was a military commander active in the Kanto region in the late Muromachi period (1336-1573), and is famous for having pioneered the development of Edo (present-day Tokyo) and built Edo Castle. He is also famous for the following anecdote: “When Doukan came to Echigo to visit his father, he encountered a sudden shower and stopped at a farmhouse to borrow a straw raincoat. Doukan was annoyed that he was offered a flower while he was trying to borrow a straw raincoat. Later, when he told this story to his retainer, he was told that it was a reference to a poem by Prince Kanemei in the “Goshui Waka Shu” (“The Seven-Pealed and Eight-Pealed Flowers Bloom, but Not a Single Fruit of Yamabuki is Sad”), in which the prince replied in a humble manner that he was poor and had no straw raincoat in his house with thatched roof in the mountains. Ashamed of his ignorance of ancient poems, Doukan thereafter devoted himself to the art of poetry and became a renowned poet.

Not many novels have been written about Ota Dokan, and the only one that mentions him as a main character is Ota Dokan, the Tiger General by Hata Daisuke, and some of his works appear in Ryotaro Shiba‘s “Hakone no Saka” about Houjou Soun.

In addition, as a scene from Musashi Province in the 11th century, more than 400 years before Dokan, the “Sarashina Nikki” describes how the author was taken by his father to this place when he was a child. As an ancient poem says, “In Musashino, there are no mountains for the moon to enter, and the grass is the only thing that comes out of the grass.

When Tokugawa Ieyasu developed Edo (now Tokyo), he recruited a group of warriors from the Hachioji Castle of the Hojo clan to live in Hachioji as a new group of vassals, and had them live at the western end of the Koshu Highway. In the early Edo period, a man with 10 ryo was enough for one person. In the early Edo period, 10 ryo was enough to live for a year).

When Ezo (now Hokkaido) was threatened by Russia in the mid-Edo period, these Hachioji Senjin Doshin were sent to the area around present-day Tomakomai to defend and cultivate the land. In the second year, 16 people died and many others became ill and had to return to their homes. The story of these hardships is told in Kai Tsujido‘s historical novel, Kaze no Ichibei (9) Fujin.

Further down the road to the end of the Edo period, the Shinsengumi warriors Isamu Kondo, Toshizo Hijikata, Soji Okita, and others appeared along the Koshu Highway. From the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period, there remained many people in Edo (Tokyo) who held an ideology that could be described as an ideology of the old shogunate that was attached to the Tokugawa shogunate. When he was disgusted with a place outside of Tokyo, he said, “You can’t plant pine trees and cedar trees in a place like that,” and other anecdotes that reflect the strong Edokko spirit.

After a brief discussion of Edo, we headed first to Kobutsu Pass (the star on the far left of the map above).

On the way to Komakino (star in the map), we took a wrong turn and headed left, and ended up at the “Great Darumi Pass.

Returning in the direction of Kobutsu Pass, we finally head for Mt.Takao

Takao is also one of the most popular mountain climbing courses in the Tokyo area.

After turning back halfway up the pass, the story moves on to the last shogun of the Edo Shogunate, Yoshinobu Tokugawa. It is still fresh in our minds that Kusanagi Tsuyoshi also gave a good performance in “Seiten wo Sukuke” aired last year

He was a man of a hundred years of age, but he also possessed a brilliant talent for intrigue, and at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate’s reign, he was in Kyoto, performing almost solo (in that he did not borrow the authority of the shogunate) against the court and Satcho’s Alliance. In the end, he is treated as a figure who cannot be taken in a straightforward manner. He was also the longest lived shogun of the Tokugawa family (surviving until the Taisho era).

Ryotaro Shiba even goes so far as to say that only Ieyasu, the first, and Yoshinobu, the last, of the successive Tokugawa shoguns could do such a job in his view.

In the next article, we will discuss the Katsuragi Michi.