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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.
In the previous article , I described the Kasturagi Road. In this article, I will discuss the Choshu Road.
Choshu Road
Choshu-ji is the present-day cities of Hagi and Yamaguchi in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and is also the stage from which many of the Bakumatsu no Shishi (patriots at the end of the Edo period) who appear in Ryotaro Shiba‘s novels emerged. After describing the temperament of the Choshu people, who were the driving force behind the Meiji Restoration, with their combination of sagacity and inquisitiveness, the trip started at the Amidadera and Dannoura towns in Shimonoseki on the Kanmon Straits, and went back in time to the Ouchi and Mori periods of the Warring States period, before proceeding to Yudaonsen, Yamaguchi City, and Tsuwano, where Tsuwano began to smile at the forest. It concludes with stories about Ogai, Nishi Amane, and others.
The journey begins in Shimonoseki (lower left star on map), a city that connects Honshu (Yamaguchi) and Kyushu.
To Dannoura, where the Taira and Minamoto clans fought in the Middle Ages and the Taira clan was destroyed.
The official name of Shimonoseki is Akamaseki (赤馬関), which was called Bakan (馬関) by the old people. The Amidadera Temple (Akamagu) in Bakan was dedicated to the young emperor Antoku (upper center of the lower painting), who sank with the Taira clan at Dannoura.
The shrine is said to have been a temple called Amidadera before the Meiji period, but became a shrine with the deification of the emperor after the Meiji period. Akama Shrine also contains the tombs of the Heike clan. The first chief priest of Akama Shrine was Shoichiro Shiraishi, a wealthy merchant from Shimonoseki who apparently financed most of the activities of the Choshu samurai at the end of the Edo period, but he left almost no name in history, nor was he a person who would submit accounts of his past. (He was also associated with such figures at the end of the Edo period as Shinsaku Takasugi, Ryoma Sakamoto, and Takamori Saigo, and often appears in dramas set at the end of the Edo period (for example, he appeared in “Saigo-Don” recently broadcast on NHK).)
From here, the story continues to the rise and fall of the Ouchi clan, the warlord of Suo, the Mori clan that succeeded it, and Choshu at the end of the Edo period. As a road trip, we head for the Matsudaya Hotel, a long-established hot spring hotel at Yuda Onsen in Yamaguchi City (star in the middle of the map above).
The matsutake mushrooms served at the hotel are called matsutake mushrooms (samatsu), which are harvested between June and August, and are called “fake matsutake,” “matsutake modoki,” or “stupid matsutake,” because they have the shape and color of matsutake mushrooms but lack the unique scent of matsutake mushrooms.
The story now turns to the Kiheitai, a fighting group composed of non-samurai members of the Choshu clan at the end of the Edo period.
The kiheitai, the most powerful fighting force at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, shot from the sideline in principle, using landmarks for “cover” and moving from place to place like rats while “hiding” when advancing. This method of warfare, which seems commonplace in today’s terms, was seen as “sloppy warfare” by the samurai of the time, and is said to have been very effective in actual battles. In addition, the library in the Kibeitai’s camp was quite well-stocked, and they were not only a fighting group, but also a learning group.
From the Kiheitai, the story goes back to the Ouchi clan of the Sengoku period. The Ouchi clan was the largest feudal lord in western Japan, controlling a vast territory that stretched from Fukuoka in Kyushu in the west to Yamaguchi, Shimane, Tottori, Hiroshima, and Okayama in the south. The city was built in the Kyoto style, not only in streets and buildings, but also in cultural aspects by inviting Kyoto craftsmen and children, etc., to create both hardware and software in the Kyoto style.
The wealth and power of the Ouchi clan reached its peak during the reign of Yoshihiro Ouchi, the son of Masahiro and Yoshiko Ouchi, who was one of the key figures in the Onin War, but he committed suicide when his chief vassal, Harukata Sue, rebelled against him. The Mori clan was forced out of Hiroshima, their main castle, and forced to move to Yamaguchi, where the government offices were moved to the less convenient Hagi.
The five-story pagoda of Ruriko-ji Temple in Yamaguchi, where Ryotaro Shiba headed, was planned by his younger brother Moriakira and completed in 1442 to mourn the loss of Ouchi Yoshihiro, who was killed in the Onin War of 1399.
The five-story pagoda of Ruriko-ji Temple has a complicated historical background: when the Mori clan moved to Hagi, as mentioned earlier, the original temple was abandoned because it could neither be used as a castle nor a turret. 80 or so years later, when the Mori economy recovered, a temple was built around the pagoda again.
The next leg of the Choshu journey takes us out of Yamaguchi and to Tsuwano (star on the upper right of the map). Tsuwano was a small clan established against Choshu in what is now Shimane Prefecture, a region that suffered at the end of the Edo period when it was caught between Choshu and the shogunate.
Tsuwano is a little Kyoto in the San-in region where an old merchant town called Tonomachi still remains, and has produced many literary figures such as Mori Ogai and Nishi Amane. Mori Ogai is famous for his novels such as “Maihime,” “Ita Sexualis,” and “The Abe Clan,” as well as for his service as a military doctor in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and appears in Ryotaro Shiba‘s “Saka no ue no Kumo (Clouds Over the Hill).
Nishi-Amane was Japan’s first scholar of the humanities, and while the Shinsengumi were engaged in sword fighting in Kyoto, he was in Netherland, where he was devoted to Comte’s empirical philosophy, majoring in economics and law, and also had a strong interest in Kant. If we seek the courtesy of Japan’s predecessors, I think that the ideas of Ogyu Sorai are barely close to the West. He returned to Japan when the aforementioned Keiki Tokugawa was shogun, and was in Kyoto as Yoshinobu‘s secretary, and even stayed at his house when Ogai came to Tokyo in the Meiji era.
Nishi-Amane was also a creator of words and a pioneer in translating Western words and devising translations of many philosophy- and science-related words that appear frequently in this blog, such as “philosophy,” “art,” “reason,” “science,” “technology,” “psychology,” “consciousness,” “knowledge,” “concept,” “induction,” “deduction,” “definition,” “proposition,” and “decomposition. He is a pioneer in the development of translations of many philosophical and scientific terms that appear frequently on this blog, including “knowledge,” “concept,” “induction,” “deduction,” “definition,” and “proposition.
After passing through Tsuwano, the road to Choshu ends in Masuda (upper right of the map) on the Sea of Japan side, where we saw the garden of Iinkoji Temple, said to be the work of Sesshu as described in “Sesshu and Freedom“.
Yamaguchi (Choshu) has various historical traces and the culture born from them. The geographical conditions of its proximity to Honshu to the east, Kyushu to the west, Shikoku to the south, and mainland China to the north make it the most proximate to these areas in Japan, and it has fostered cultural exchange with many other areas and a unique history.
In the next article, I will discuss the Mutsu Road.
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