There’s a rule for good satire: punch up.

This was no less the case in the Edo period. And one of the major genres through which this happened is called gesaku. While a lot of what we usually focus on in this podcast pertains to the warrior caste or those immediately adjacent to it, gesaku was primarily the domain of everybody but the samurai. These commoners used it as an outlet through which to talk romance, satire, religion, comedy, and much more.

In the first place, gesaku is actually an umbrella term. It means “playful writing,” and has a wide range of subgenres, most notably senryu poems, kibyoshi, dangibon, sharebon, kokkeibon, ninjobon, kusazoshi, and yomihon. Kokkeibon and kibyoshi, in particular, translate well to modern form. Kokkeibon is a gesaku subgenre, usually illustrated, and telling the story of commoners’ lives with a heavy focus on humor. An especially notable example of kokkeibon is Jipppensha Ikku’s Tokaidochu Hizakurige, which was translated into English by Thomas Satchell in 1960 as Shank’s Mare. Hizakurige is a lively slapstick story of two friends from Edo, Yaji and Kita, who travel west along the Tokaido Highway on pilgrimage to Ise Grand Shrine. Hijinks ensue, and continue through a sequel. Kibyoshi, on the other hand, are illustrated– think of them as proto-comic books– where text was woven into the images. These ranged from ten to thirty pages.

But remember, folks, this was the Edo period, where although the commoners held an increasing share of the country’s wealth, it was still the warrior caste that was in the exalted position in the societal hierarchy, and which possessed a monopoly on government and state-sanctioned violence. So we need to sidebar and talk about a daimyo named Matsudaira Sadanobu here.

Matsudaira Sadanobu was the son of Tayasu Munetake, one of the sons of the 8th shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune. Tayasu Munetake headed one of the Gosankyo or 3 Lords, the families that held daimyo-level income but who were not daimyo, instead being tasked with producing a ready supply of alternate heirs should the main Shogunal lineage die out, as it had before Yoshimune’s time. Sadanobu was adopted out to the Hisamatsu-Matsudaira family of Shirakawa domain in northern Honshu. The Hisamatsu-Matsudaira family was a cadet branch of the Tokugawa clan, and while it wasn’t too powerful in its own right, it still had that prestige by osmosis– however, it was also in the grip of financial crisis when Sadanobu was adopted in. He attained fame in his domain as well as in Edo for getting the domain’s finances back into working order, and used this fame as well as his birth family’s connections to get an appointment as the Shogunate’s chief councilor in 1787. In his tenure as chief councilor, he championed a series of political reforms called the Kansei Reforms, which aimed to straighten out the Shogunate’s faltering finances, make contingency plans for future disasters in the form of granaries, stabilize the population (and thus the tax base) in the countryside by sending peasants who’d moved to Edo back home to their villages, and more. But it had a darker side, in which it also attempted to legislate morality, by cracking down on gesaku and its authors.

So against the backdrop of these reforms, we need to talk about one of the most notable authors of gesaku, a late 18th century author and artist called Santo Kyoden.

Kyoden was born into a family of lumberyard pawnbrokers, but became a skilled ukiyo-e artist and prolific author. It was Santo Kyoden who, in a 1788 gesaku work, defined the characteristics of the Edokko, the quintessential Edo townsman, as follows– translation as appearing in Gerald Groemer’s translation of Nishiyama Matsunosuke’s book Edo Culture:

1. He receives his first bath in the water of the city’s aqueduct; he grows up in sight of the gargoyles on the roof of Edo castle.

2. He is not attached to money; he is not stingy. His funds do not cover the night’s lodging.

3. He is raised in a high-class, protected manner. He is quite unlike either warriors or country bumpkins.

4. He is a man of Nihonbashi to the bone.

5. He has iki (refinement) and hari (strength of character)

But as Nishiyama observes, these characteristics were more imaginary than based in fact, as they don’t mesh with the realities of life in Edo. For example– Nagoya, not Edo Castle, had gargoyles (shachihoko) on its roof, and the aqueducts of Edo had dirty water, not anything to bathe in. Nishiyama argues that this has more to do with poking fun at hoity-toity people from the Kansai region (central Japan, the greater Kyoto-Osaka area) than anything real about life in Edo for people from Edo. At any rate, what’s certain is that Santo Kyoden was a renowned, beloved author and artist, and apparently one of the first to turn writing from something simply done for the love of it, to a career on which one could base a living. And he did not spare the powerful from his satirizing, not one bit!

Kyoden first satirized the Kansei reforms in Nitan no Shiro Fuji no hitoana kenbutsu, and modeled the plot of Jidai Sewacho tsuzumi after the murder of Tanuma Okitomo. He poked fun at the Reforms again in Koshi-jima toki ni aizome, and then drew illustrations for Ishibe Kinko’s kibyoshi work, Kokubyaku mizu-kagami.

At this point, the authorities felt that they’d had enough of this uppity townsman who wouldn’t stop making fun of them, and fined Kyoden. But in response, Kyoden released 3 more books, after which Matsudaira Sadanobu personally ordered Kyoden placed under house arrest and manacled for fifty days.

But Matsudaira Sadanobu had a secret: he was a Santo Kyoden fanboy, and he was an author of gesaku himself!

Hypocrite, much?

Yes, Sadanobu had Kyoden put under house arrest and manacled, but he also made sure to get an autograph from the man. And much more surprisingly, Sadanobu himself was the author of Daimyo Katagi, whose first half is in kibyoshi style and whose second half, written in sermonizing dangibon style, is a gesaku rant par excellence, about daimyo being posers! Historian Haruko Iwasaki even argues that Sadanobu was an avid reader of gesaku beyond the work of Kyoden alone, and that his work is particularly influenced by a then-recent work called Kyogen-zuki Yabo Daimyo (The Naive Daimyo Infatuated with Kyogen), which was written by Kishida Toho and illustrated by Kitao Masayoshi, published in early 1784. Kyogen is the comedic theatrical form that provides the lighter interludes that punctuate a longer series of Noh plays. Sure enough, the unnamed, hapless lord in Daimyo Katagi becomes obsessed with theater, falling asleep on-stage after a rehearsal one day, only to be visited by a Chinese sage in his dreams and yelled at. The sage’s rant is so incandescent that at times it seems worthy of Lewis Black’s rants. His invective tears apart everything from the daimyo’s meaningless pursuit of martial arts without understanding of what fighting actually is, to the lack of practicality of people who claim to understand military engineering without due diligence to matters of logistics and personnel, and even issues of medicine, religion, and decorum don’t escape the sage’s tirade. It’s really quite something, and I encourage you to follow the link and read Haruko Iwasaki’s translation for yourself. She translated it in 1983, and you can read it here– if you’re listening to the podcast, follow the link.

While Sadanobu went to great trouble to hide it, his personal attendants discovered Daimyo Katagi among his papers after his death, and they and their descendants were responsible for seeing it to publication in the Meiji era.

While the Kansei Reforms had a chilling effect on the freedom of non-warriors to poke fun at those in power, gesaku came back in force a few decades later. And even today, gesaku continues to revereberate via modern adaptations: Hizakurige got an outlandishly surreal, slapstick-heavy, anachronism-heavy movie rendition in 2005 as Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san. I think Santo Kyoden would’ve approved.

Bans pass, politicians pass, but satire is eternal.

The Tokugawa Shogunate is dead. Long live gesaku!

Sources

• Hibbett, Howard. Chrysanthemum and the Fish. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002), p. 91.
• Haruko Iwasaki, “Portrait of a Daimyo: Comical Fiction by Matsudaira Sadanobu.” Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 1-19. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2384009
• Matsudaira Sadanobu, “Daimyo Katagi.” tr. Haruko Iwasaki. Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 20-48. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2384010
• Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture. Translated by Gerald Groemer. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), p. 51.
• Ooms, Herman. Charismatic Bureaucrat. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 141.
• Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 415-416.
• ___. Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 225.

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Falconry– that is, using trained birds of prey in hunting– has, for a very long time, been a mark of upperclass culture in Japan. The term for this in Japanese is takagari. In the interest of brevity and keeping things as consistent as I can, I’m going to refer to this practice as “falconry” throughout this episode. But regardless of the specific type of bird in question, I’m still talking about takagari.

In terms of the origins of this system, its oldest forms entered Japan via Korea, as did much else in the orbit of the early Yamato court. Much later, starting in the late Heian era, the ascendant warrior caste adopted many of the trappings of court life and culture, falconry among them. And in time, some warrior clans, and the regions they inhabited, came to be known for particularly prized hunting birds. You guessed it– house Date of Sendai had that distinction. No less than all 3 Great Unifiers– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu even wrote to request hunting birds from this distant clan that was otherwise not particularly politically concerning to them for quite a while. Other clans are also on record as having gifted hunting birds to the Date family– for example, Date Chike Kiroku, the orthodox history of the Date clan, notes that Mogami Yoshiaki, Date Masamune’s maternal uncle, sent a letter to his nephew on 17 September 1586 together with a falcon. At another occasion on 3 November 1588, Date Chike Kiroku notes that

“Three hawks (otaka 雄鷹) arrived from Moniwa, in Natori County. On the same day, Fukuhara Kura presented three skylarks caught by his hawk, to his lordship.”

According to our old standby, folklorist Mihara Ryokichi, there was a falconry center at Kome-ga-fukuro in the Sendai castle town, with a second one– added in the late Edo period– eventually set up in nearby Tsuchitoi. Mihara notes that the birds were treated better than some Date vassals– each one got its own room, and attendants caught the smaller birds that these birds of prey ate. The attendants who caught these small birds for food were called esashi. There were 102 esashi, who followed the Date lord on hunting trips in order to care for these hunting birds. Mihara notes that the esashi were recognizable by their clothing– dark blue cotton happi with a sun disk on the back– and a type of sedge hat called a manju-gasa (pictured, top left).

The esashi were organized into 3 units of 34 people each, with one unit commander (yogashira 与頭) and two squad commanders (tokogashira 床頭), under the command of a mid-ranking Date vassal of chakuza 着座 or meshidashi 召出しrank. A different set of personnel, dedicated falconers, who were of slightly higher kumishi rank, trained the falcons. In wartime, the falconers would be elite gunners, while the esashi were spearmen. Despite their critical service in supporting the clan’s falconing needs, the esashi were poor– got paid half a gold ryō a year, though some of them received further allotments of maybe 3 koku a year. I’ve mentioned in the past that low ranking members of the warrior caste were no strangers to the gig economy, and the esashi were no exception– their main side-job for extra income was making paper cords for tying topknots.

So. House Date took its falconry seriously.

But how does falconry work, you might ask? Well, a bird of prey– often a northern goshawk, in Japanese falconry– is trained to hunt smaller prey by being rewarded with food. And if a warrior had the financial wherewithal to be able to afford a hunting bird, they weren’t going to go out and do it alone.

(I mean really. Who do you take them for?)

No, they’re going to do it in style, as with everything else that’s supposed to showcase both their status as well as ensure their security in that status. So, say, a daimyo was on the hunt with a particularly favored hunting bird would also have personal attendants, bodyguards, porters, esashi, and so on– it wasn’t a solo affair at all.

Stick a pin in that one if you would, friends– it’s going to matter in a moment.

When Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of Shogun from Emperor Goyozei in 1603, he began the process of setting up a legal code that would regulate the affairs of the warrior caste in order to better ensure that the peace bought by his alliances and force of arms would be a lasting one. These laws didn’t just govern military affairs, and they weren’t just a one-off matter either. They were issued in successive waves or editions, and dealt with everything from castle construction to court title usage to the affairs of temples and shrines. Among the many matters they curtailed was the raising and movement of armies and the limits of who was allowed to pursue falconry, and in what manner.

On the level of individual fiefdoms as well as the Shogunate, falconry fields were set up and rangers appointed to manage the game and plant life within. This wasn’t limited to falconry, either– some longtime followers of this podcast from back when it was just a Twitter thread may recall when I talked about the cricket ranges in service to house Date.

But by Shogunate law, there were also limitations on what game was allowed to a daimyo of a given court rank. Date Masamune, despite his efforts at quietly accruing local and international support to conquer Japan, held high court rank, and managed to ingratiate himself with house Tokugawa in part through a shared interest in falconry. Ieyasu himself granted several falconry preserves to house Date as a result, and many were the occasions where Masamune went hunting with Ieyasu. Sometimes, Masamune would also rest on his way to or from Edo in lodgings at one of these falconry preserves, and he didn’t always use a bird to do his hunting– at least one occasion noted in the Date Chike Kiroku and the Date Butoku Ibunroku notes he hunted with a matchlock gun.

But I can hear you saying, “Hey Doc, what was that about entourages and movement of armies?”

Hang on. Wait for it. We’re getting to it, friends, we’re getting to it.

Okay. So.

Large movements of fighting forces were curtailed by Shogunate law, in the interest of keeping the peace. The common expression at the time was that the Shogunate officials at the checkpoints going into Edo were to watch for “guns going in and women going out.” Now sure, a lord’s entourage to and from the capital was also armed, but it was there more for show of status than actual application as a large, organized fighting force. But the Shogunate still expected the daimyo to be able to field a fighting force on the Shogunate’s behalf if called upon. So, bearing in mind the point I often bring up– the one argued by Luke Roberts in Performing the Great Peace– the appearance of following the rules was more important than actually following the rules. Daimyo consequently had to find ways of skirting the rules to make up for that disconnect.

In house Date, one of the ways that that was made up for was by using falconry as a cover for field exercises. There were a number of places where this was done, one of them being Matsumori Castle, just north of the Sendai Castle town and located astride the Oshu Highway just north of the Nanakita River. Matsumori Castle was a small fortification once controlled by the Kokubun family, which had over time become mediated (that is, absorbed into) the Date clan, and by the late 16th century was ruled by Masamune’s uncle, Kokubun Morishige. Date forces would go there more than once a year, but the first time in a given year was in every New Year’s holiday, on the third day of the first month, for what was called Nohajime (野始め “first field”)․ As noted above, the daimyo didn’t travel alone on hunting trips, so it was only proper for the daimyo’s entourage to accompany him or his duly appointed substitute on this excursion. Ostensibly a hunting trip, it was in actuality a chance for the clan’s fighting forces to get practice maneuvering, scouting, and shooting. Date was not even the only clan to do this– house Matsudaira of nearby Aizu domain is another major example of a clan that had a similar practice.

Until the late Edo period, when there were less and less restrictions the fiefdoms actually paid attention to, it did the trick.

Today, large troop movements in Japan aren’t disguised as hunting trips, but are no less rare. And while the warrior caste no longer exists, a dedicated community of trained and licensed experts keeps the art of falconry alive. You can visit the homepage of the Nihon Houyou Kyoukai at site.falconry.jp

Sources

• Date Butoku Ibunroku, p. 26.
• Date Chike Kiroku 1, p. 247, 313, 460
• ”Kokubun-shi.” http://www2.harimaya.com/sengoku/html/kokub_k.html Accessed 20 May 2021.
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyodoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hobundo, Showa 58 [1983]), pp. 59-62.
• Nihon Houyou Kyoukai. site.falconry.jp Accessed 20 May 2021.
• Noriko Otsuka. “Falconry: Tradition and Acculturation.” International Journal of Sport and Health Science 2006 Volume 4 Issue Special Issue 2006. Pages 198-207.

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Here’s the thing.

The definition of a daimyo in the Edo period gets weird around the edges. There are some broad definitions applied to daimyo, but they aren’t nearly as clear-cut as one might assume. So, let’s start with more or less the standard definition.

Per Kotobank, an online encyclopedia and dictionary, a daimyo is a person who is recognized as an independent feudal lord by the Tokugawa Shogun– along the way, usually receiving a kanji from the ruling Shogun’s name to mark the affirmation or reaffirmation of that status– and held over 10,000 koku (bales of rice) in income, usually in the form of a landholding. One might say, “but hey now, Doc, what about a castle?” but this isn’t required to be a daimyo– there were lots and lots of daimyo who neatly fall within the traditional definition of the term who didn’t have one, so this isn’t an integral part of that definition.

Anyway, so in short, that’s (1) Shogunal recognition as a daimyo, and (2) at least 10,000 koku of income. You with me so far?

Good, ’cause from here on out it gets weird. The sheer number of exceptions and edge cases render the standard definition kind of laughably flimsy and hollow.

First, we have the people who held over 10,000 koku, even way over 10,000 koku, but were not daimyo. The most notable case of these is the Tayasu, Shimizu, and Hitotsubashi lords, the 3 Tokugawa cadet branch lords who were collectively called the Gosankyo, the 3 Lords. They resided in the Shogun’s castle, held great prestige, held over 100,000 koku of income in the form of direct emolument, but weren’t daimyo! Their lineages existed solely to provide backup heirs should the main Shogunal lineage die out. This happened at the very tail end of the Edo period, when Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu became Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the 15th and last shogun, in 1866.

Secondly there were the people who held over 10,000 koku but were not daimyo. Bigger domains ruled by older daimyo families like the Date in the north or the Shimazu in the far south had many cases of this, often but not always in the form of cadet branches. The Katakura family’s a good case in point. With a holding of 18,000 koku, the family was a Date vassal clan and held Shiroishi Castle in the domain’s south as its residence. It nearly became an independent daimyo family in the 1590s, due to the invitations of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, but his offer of recognition was refused by Katakura Kagetsuna (Kojuro I), who chose to continue service to the house of Date. I suspect if he hadn’t, his sister Kita– who had been wetnurse and first tutor in martial arts to both Kagetsuna and his overlord Date Masamune– would never have let him hear the end of it. And while Kagetsuna and several others like him in Date service held daimyo-level income and many of the trappings of a daimyo, they were not daimyo themselves.

Third, daimyo who didn’t actually have the traditional daimyo level income. A noteworthy case of this is the Ashikaga family of Kitsuregawa domain. This was a branch of the same family that was once the 2nd shogunal dynasty back during the Muromachi era. Because of this exalted lineage, the Tokugawa shogunate gave it the status of a 100,00 koku domain, despite the fact that its landholdings, centered on Kitsuregawa in modern-day Sakura, Tochigi Prefecture, never amounted to more than 5,000 koku. It was excused from alternate-attendance duty, the duty by which the Shogunate kept the daimyo and high-ranking bannermen (hatamoto) in Edo some of the year. But perhaps out of pride and wanting to keep up appearances with its peers, the Kitsuregawa family performed alternate attendance in Edo anyway.

Which brings me to an even stranger case, that of daimyo who were simultaneously recognized as daimyo but were also vassals of other daimyo. Tamura of Ichinoseki domain, in modern Iwate Prefecture, is a case of this. Holding a modest but respectable 30,000 koku, the house Tamura was a cadet branch of the house of Date. It performed alternate-attendance in Edo and was recognized as an independent daimyo by the shogun. However, it was also a Date cadet branch and vassal family and held status within Sendai domain!

To sidebar, for a moment: Sendai domain was unique in that it had a microcosm of the Shogunate-domain (bakuhan taisei) system in place. Sendai domain was very large, and unwieldy to manage from one or two castles, as most other domains were managed in the Edo period. Thus, Date vassals held landholdings throughout the domain and performed alternate attendance on the lord in Sendai just as the lord performed alternate-attendance on the shogun, his overlord, in Edo. This was a system the Date had used for centuries, dating back to before the Edo period’s onset in the 17th century. Senior vassals held castles– called fortresses (yogai) to stay within the letter of the Shogunate law on castles– but many Date vassals, great and small, held landholdings throughout the domain where they lived at least part of the time. And Tamura of Ichinoseki performed alternate-attendance– or at any rate, maintained offices– in both Edo and Sendai.

There were also situations where the definition involved some measure of overt or tacit hostility. Some people who are considered daimyo in the Edo period used to be vassals of daimyo who did an end run around their overlords, got confirmed as daimyo by the shogun, but not officially recognized as such by their now ex-overlords. The most notable case of this is the house of Tsugaru, in the far north of Honshu, who had once been vassals of the Nanbu clan of Morioka domain, but became independent when they reached Hideyoshi and pledged fealty to him ahead of the Nanbu daimyo. The two clans were at odds for the rest of the Edo period, with multiple assassinations and other clashes marking their shared history, once even nearly coming to open war and requiring Shogunate arbitration during what’s called the Cypress Tree Incident (Hinokiyama-sodo). To this day, local wisdom has it that people from the old Tsugaru land (Aomori) and people from the old Nanbu land (Morioka) don’t get along. There is also rather famously the case of the Inada family, which ruled Awaji island and had been on track to become an independent daimyo when the Edo period began, and had to remain in what had been a temporary assignment as reinforcement to the Hachisuka clan of Tokushima domain. Promised independence in exchange for imperial service in the Boshin War of 1868-1869, the Inada clan made a bid for independence, but that bid was met by a crackdown and attack on its castle town, in what’s called the Kogo Incident. Inada Kunitane and his retainers got to very briefly set up as their own independent domain, but far north in the newly named and officially annexed Hokkaido– events that were dramatized in the 2005 film Kita no Zeronen.

Finally, there were people who held daimyo level income and status, but were heading a branch of a much larger domain on whose administration, facilities, and personnel they relied, to the extent that they weren’t meaningfully independent. Any domain you might encounter whose name ends in “Shinden” is a case of this– a domain whose tax base was made by clearing out new field (shinden) to make that magic minimum of 10,000 koku.

There are many more cases in point, here, and any serious consideration of history has to be more than just the disconnected reciting of anecdotes. I’d be going on for multiple episodes if I did that, and we need to keep the show going. Suffice it to say, there are many, many edge cases that make a clear-cut definition to “daimyo” in the Edo period ring a little hollow– and I think it’s a good lesson in questioning the limits and rigidity of terms that, in history, we tend to take for granted.

So, what makes a daimyo?

Eh. It depends!

Sources

• “Daimyo.” https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%A4%A7%E5%90%8D-92048 Accessed 13 May 2021
• Kazama Kansei, “Shiroishi-jō,” pp. 125-138 of Sendaijō to Sendairyō no Shiro, Yōgai (Tokyo: Meichō Shuppan, 1982), pp. 126-127.
• “Kessanji no Kaiki: Katakura Kojuro Kagetsuna-ko.” https://kessanji.jp/history/katakura Accessed 14 January 2021.
• Kudō Mutsuo. Mura no Dekigoto- Tōhoku: Hankyō wo Meguru Tsugaru, Nanbu Sanron, pp. 166-167.
• Sendaijō to Sendairyō no Shiro, Yōgai, ed. Kobayashi Seiji (Tokyo: Meichō Shuppan, 1982)
• “Sumoto Castle 洲本城” Japan National Tourism Organization https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/1047/ Accessed 13 May 2021
• Conrad Totman. Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600-1843. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 110-115, 126-130.
• Toshio G. Tsukahira. Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan: the Sankin Kotai System. (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1966), pp. 39, 52-53.

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Sendai, capital of Miyagi Prefecture, is known today as the City of Trees (Mori no Miyako 杜の都 in Japanese). It has no shortage of parks and other green spaces. Some of them are very old, like the old growth forest on the north and west sides of Mount Aoba. But others are newly planted during the postwar reconstruction boom. And in the heart of downtown, just north of the Sendai Station complex, is Kōtōdai Park– Kōtōdai-kōen in Japanese. One theory of its naming origin is that because it was like an elevated platform (kōdai) compared to the then-center of town (Bashō’s Crossing, in what’s now Kokubun-chō district), it was called Kōtōdai. The local dialect rendered this as “Kodoonodee,” in the Edo period. There’s a famous bandshell and amphitheater there, that even fans of anime will recognize from Wake Up, Girls! Like elsewhere in town, there are many zelkova trees in particular, a tree which is one of the natural symbols of the city as well as the prefecture. There were buildings on this site before, but in the wake of the 1945 bombings of Sendai, they were destroyed, and the area was turned into a park, which it remains today.

And we can get a hint of its earlier importance in the fact that the park is ringed by three different sets of office complexes: the Miyagi Prefectural hall, the Sendai City Hall, and the Aoba Ward office.

It was once the site of Yōkendō, the preeminent domain school in Date lands. Established in 1736 as the Gakumonjo, it moved to what’s now Kōtōdai Park in 1761, and received its best known name of Meirin Yōkendō, or Yōkendō for short, in 1772 (Meiwa 9). It was one of the major domain schools in Edo period Japan, albeit not as famous as places like Mito domain’s Kodokan Academy or Sakura domain’s Juntendo Academy or Aizu domain’s Nisshinkan Academy. A domain school– hankō 藩校 in Japanese– is the institution that trained a feudal domain’s vassals in scholarly, military, and sometimes practical arts. This was where a domain would do the work of training up its next generations of not only scholars but also administrators and in the late Edo period, its military leaders. Some domains would send these schools’ exceptional graduates on to further postgraduate work at the Shoheizaka Academy, the Shogunate’s preeminent educational institution. In some domains, the domain school wasn’t open to retainers of all ranks, leaving foot soldiers and other low-ranking retainers to study at temple schools alongside their commoner neighbors. This isn’t too surprising– longtime listeners of the podcast and readers of its earlier thread-only form might remember me talking about how the definition of what constituted a warrior was subjective, and varied, depending on which sub-stratum of the caste that you asked. But for most of its history, Yokendo was open to warriors of all ranks. Sendai domain being as big and decentralized as it was, there was more than one school for warriors in Date lands– Yubikan is a famous case of an academy which educated the vassals of one of the senior retainers of the Date, the Date family of Iwadeyama. But the central, most prominent school open for all warriors in Sendai domain was Yōkendō.

Yōkendō was for 56 years and three successive holders of the office of rector (Gakutō), overseen by members of the scholarly Ōtsuki family: Ōtsuki Heisen, Ōtsuki Jukusai, and Ōtsuki Bankei. The Ōtsuki family produced many scholars and physicians in service to both the house of Date as well as to the Tokugawa Shogunate. They and their scholarly connections were responsible for driving some of Yōkendō’s particularly pioneering work in engineering, shipbuilding, medicine, and even foreign studies. Russian studies in Japan began at Yōkendō, and was a policy instituted in light of how the Date forces constantly bumped into imperial Russian expeditions during coast guard duty in Ezochi, or what’s now Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and southern Sakhalin. Much later, just before the Boshin War, Yōkendō also had English language classes. In addition, thanks to these connections and interests as well as the ruling Date family’s long history of scholarly pursuits, the school not only possessed an extensive library in scholarly and military works in Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and English, but once also boasted one of Japan’s foremost libraries of Chinese classics and religious texts, which was housed in Ryūhōji temple, next door to Ōsaki Hachiman Shrine, one of the city’s preeminent shrines to Hachiman, the battle kami.

The school had many noted graduates even in the Edo period. Takano Chōei (1804-1850) is of particular note; he was a physician and scholar of Dutch studies in the early to mid 19th century. He was born into a family serving one of the Date daimyo’s senior vassals, the Date family of Mizusawa. After getting his start at Yōkendō, Chōei went on to study in Nagasaki under the Prussian doctor Philipp Franz von Siebold, where among his classmates was scholar and painter Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841).

But in modern Japan, quite possibly the single most famous Yōkendō alumnus was Ōtsuki Fumihiko (1847-1928), the son of one of the school’s rectors. After a course of study at Yōkendō that included English study, he saw service as a staff officer during the Boshin War. Later, he went on to earn a Ph.D.– one of the first Japanese people to earn a western style doctorate. And in an act that helped revolutionize the development of modern Japanese, Ōtsuki Fumihiko compiled one of the first modern Japanese dictionaries– Genkai 言海, or Sea of Words– in 1891. He followed this up with Daigenkai, or Great Sea of Words, which was published posthumously in multiple volumes from 1932 to 1937. He was also involved in the editing of Sendai Sōshō, a multivolume compendium of major primary source material, legal records, and genealogical information pertaining to the old Sendai domain, and you can read it today on Archive.org! 

And what of the school that molded generations of young Sendai vassals?

Unlike other domain schools that kept their names and just became modern universities and high schools largely unaltered, Yōkendō did not survive in its former form. The staff and some of the assets, including what survived of its library, were absorbed by several new institutions in the 1870s. They are now part of Tohoku University, the preeminent higher education institution in modern Sendai. But that’s not where our story ends.

After the Boshin War and the disestablishment of the domains, the government instituted the modern system of prefectures, pushing them through several phases of consolidation until their current count of 47. Many of these were headquartered in newly vacated castles, but Sendai’s Aoba Castle was already occupied as the headquarters of the imperial army’s Sendai Garrison (Sendai Chindai), later known as the Second Infantry Division. So, the prefectural government headquartered instead in Yōkendō’s old buildings, and remained in them until their replacement in a new building that was opened in Showa 6 (1931) and used until its replacement by a newer building, the current Miyagi Prefectural Hall, in 1986. While some buildings of the old Yōkendō campus survived, most of them– still built in the traditional manner out of wood, tile, and plaster, did not survive Sendai’s firebombing in the summer of 1945. 

As I record this, the COVID-19 pandemic continues, and those of us who are not already in Japan cannot enter Japan. But if you’re already in Japan listening to this as it newly goes up, or if you’re listening to this at a later date when international travel is a thing again, you can see one last remnant of the old Yōkendō campus, in Sendai. Visit Taishin-in temple in Aramachi district. The back gate, which bears the Date crest along its ridgepole, is the school’s main gate. For podcast listeners, check out the photo in the accompanying blogpost. I saw it briefly when I was there in 2005. It’s a little bit hidden away, on the far side of the temple’s cemetery, but well worth the visit to pause, in the shadow of its eaves, and contemplate the students that once passed through those portals.

Not too shabby a history for one of modern Sendai’s most beloved parks.

I’m Nyri, and this has been Friday Night History. Now, questions?

Sources

• Donald Keene. Frog in the Well (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006),pp. 90-91.
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyōdoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hōbundō, Showa 58 [1983])
• “Miyagi-ken Chosha no Oitachi.” https://www.pref.miyagi.jp/site/profile/oitati.html Accessed 7 May 2021.
• “Sendai Fugaku Yōkendō.” https://www.library.pref.miyagi.jp/about/publication/kotobanoumi/kotoba-7/kotoba-7.html Accessed 7 May 2021.
• Yamakawa Kikue, Women of the Mito Domain. tr. Kate Wildman Nakai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 44.
• “Yōkendō no Zōsho to Shuppan.” https://www.library.pref.miyagi.jp/about/publication/kotobanoumi/kotoba-22/kotoba-22.html Accessed 7 May 2021.
• “Yōkendō to sono Zōsho,” Pt. 1 A, B. https://www.library.pref.miyagi.jp/about/publication/kotobanoumi/kotoba-22/kotoba-22.html Accessed 7 May 2021.