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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.
From “On the Road,” Volume 5. In the previous article, I described a trip to the vicinity of Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture. This time, I would like to describe my trip to Mongolia.
This time, I will leave Japan and travel to Mongolia. The trip started in Niigata, Japan. From Niigata Airport, I flew to Khabarovsk, Russia, and then to the Mongolian Consulate in Irkutsk, where I received my visa and changed planes twice before arriving in Mongolia. Today, there is a direct flight to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, which takes about 5 hours, but in 1973, this was the shortest route to Mongolia.
In Khabarovsk, Ryotaro Shiba looked out over the far-reaching Chinese territory on the other side of the Amur River and felt the irony of fate and history in his memories of his days as an officer in a tank regiment that once faced Soviet troops across the border. In Irkutsk, he remembered the trail of Daikokuya Kotayu, who drifted ashore from Japan during the Edo period.
In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, where he finally entered the country, Ryotaro Shiba lamented the unfortunate encounter between Japanese and Mongolians in the nightmare of the Nomonhan Incident, while in South Gobi, where he went further afield, he was struck by the star-filled sky, the steppe with hundreds of millions of flowers in bloom at one view, and the pure nomads, with whom he felt so close to home. The South Gobi is a place where you will never want to go back.
The first thing that comes to mind when Japanese people hear the word “Mongolia” is the invasion of Kyushu by the Daegen Empire (Genko), as described in “Kaido Yuku: Road to Karatsu, Hirado, Sasebo, and Nagasaki“. The invading forces were sent by the fifth Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281 during the Kamakura period (1185-1333), and were repulsed with the help of kamikaze (typhoons).
In 1240, the Mongols invaded Poland and Hungary as described in “The Country That Couldn’t Make It to the Road – Hungary“, the northern tip of Europe, and fought against Christian knights, including the famous Knights Templar, making the Mongols the largest empire in history, extending almost from one end of the Eurasian continent to the other.
This great Yuan Empire was also destroyed by the Ming Dynasty around 1380, when Zhu Yuanzhang created Nanjing as his capital. The Yuan dynasty in Chinese history was destroyed in 1368, but the Yuan dynasty in Central Eurasian history was not destroyed, and even after retreating to the Mongolian plateau, the Kubilai royal line continued for about 20 years, and for another 100 years they continued to use the state name “Da Yuan”.
The power of the Kubilai dynasty declined, and the newly emerged Juscheng tribe expanded its power. Mongolia was then ruled by the Qing Dynasty.
In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution occurred, which triggered the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, and Mongolia declared its independence from the Qing Dynasty, but in 1912, Russia downgraded the declaration of independence to a declaration of autonomy, and Russia recognized the sovereignty of the Republic of China over Outer Mongolia, while China recognized Outer Mongolia’s autonomy in domestic affairs, trade, and industry. Russia and China agreed not to send troops to Outer Mongolia and to suspend colonization.
In 1917, the Russian Revolution led to the collapse of Imperial Russia and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, followed two years later by the establishment of the People’s Republic of Mongolia in 1924. Two years later, in 1924, the People’s Republic of Mongolia was established. In 1939, a border dispute between the Kwantung Army of Manchukuo Province and the People’s Republic of Mongolia led to the Nomonhan Incident, in which the Japanese army and the Soviet Red Army intervened militarily, resulting in the defeat of the Japanese side.
The independence of the People’s Republic of Mongolia was internationally recognized in the Yalta Agreement of February 1945, when the People’s Republic of Mongolia dropped its claim to Inner Mongolia. For a long time, the People’s Republic of Mongolia was a satellite of the Soviet Union in the communist bloc, but the country began to democratize under the influence of perestroika in 1989, adopted a multi-party system in March 1990, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, adopted a new constitution in January 1992, renounced socialism, and in February 1992 changed its name to In February 1992, the country’s name was changed to the State of Mongolia.
Ryotaro Shiba and others visited Mongolia in 1973, one year after the establishment of diplomatic relations with Japan, so there were no direct flights to Mongolia, and they first flew from Niigata to Khabarovsk, Russia,
Further fly to Irkutsk.
Irkutsk touches on the topic of Daikokuya Kotayu, a shipping agent in the Edo period. Daikokuya Kotayu was caught in a storm off Suruga Island and drifted off course. After seven months of drifting, he drifted to Amchitka Island, one of the Aleutian Islands. There he encountered the Russians, and then sailed via Kamchatka, Okhotsk, and Yakutsk, arriving in Irkutsk in 1789. In Irkutsk, he met the naturalist Kirill Laxman, who was interested in Japan, and accompanied Kirill to St. Petersburg, where, thanks to the efforts of Kirill and others, he was granted an audience with Yekaterina II at Tsarskoye Selo and allowed to return home.
Novels depicting the life of Koutayu, who followed such an unusual fate, include “Oroiya kuni drunken dream tale” by Yasushi Inoue and “Daikokuya Koutayu” by Akira Yoshimura.
In Irkutsk, we received our visas at the Mongolian Consulate. From there, they will board a small Soviet-made Antonov-24 propeller-driven airliner and fly to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
The AN24 is an aircraft commonly used on domestic flights within the Soviet Union. It is a very small airliner with about 40 seats, and when flying through clouds in rainy weather, the walls are thin, so the sound of the rain is very loud.
Ulaanbaatar was called Koulon during the Qing Dynasty, but after Mongolian independence, the name was changed to Ulaanbaatar, which means “red hero” in Mongolian.
Today it is a modern city with a population of 1.4 million, but back in the 1970s it was a remote city with a population of 280,000.
Mongolia is a vast expanse of grassland, and in recent years it has been the setting for various dramas, including TBS’s “VIVANT” and netflix’s “Strong Woman Kang Namsun.
After describing the Nomonhan Incident in Ulaanbaatar, which led to the conclusion of the Japan-Germany Anti-Comintern Agreement with Nazi Germany, Ryotaro Shiba and his group headed for the southern Gobi, where they ended their trip with a star-filled sky, a meadow with hundreds of millions of flowers in full bloom at one view, and an exchange with pure nomads.
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