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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.

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Note: an earlier version of this episode stated the latest eruption of Mount Zao happened in the 1890s. The most recent eruption was in fact in April 1940. My apologies for the error.

So the story starts with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty. Fleeing the instability of the dynasty’s final decades, and then the Manchu conquest, many Ming refugees fled to safety elsewhere in East Asia, including Japan. They are responsible for a range of things that are often considered quintessentially Japanese: ramen and early judo are just two of them. Quite a few of the refugees were also hired by Japanese daimyo. As able scholars, bureaucrats, commanders, and the like, their expertise was unique and useful to these daimyo who were still setting up their domain administrations. Date Masamune was among those daimyo who hired or hosted Ming refugees, including a man named Wang Yi (Ōyoku, in Japanese 王翼). Before he came to Sendai, Wang Yi had been a general in service to the Ming, and had even fought in the Imjin War against Japan.

While Wang Yi was a former military officer, he also had experience in Daoist ritual and divination. To an aspiring conqueror of Japan and admirer of Chinese culture and classics like Date Masamune, he would have been an attractive asset. Remember, as we learned in recent episodes, beyond his generally internationalist mentality that prompted his sending a delegation to Mexico and Europe, Masamune also named his capital after the name of the place in Journey to the West where the Monkey King steals the Peaches of Immortality. He also saw his capital as a successor to Luoyang (Rakuyo in Japanese), once a capital of the Eastern Han dynasty in ancient China, and as a result, until the 20th century, a euphemism for Sendai was “Rakuchu.” Over the course of his tenure as daimyo, Masamune also had quite a few visits by Chinese travelers in Japan. During my PhD research, I found a couple of references to those visits in Date Chike Kiroku, the orthodox Date clan history, where one particularly memorable occasion was in the summer of 1589, where the visitors brought “fireworks of Chinese manufacture” with them. So it really isn’t too surprising to me that Wang Yi had come to Sendai.

But apart from building a new domain in this period, Masamune also had to contend with Mount Zaō.

Mount Zaō is a cluster of volcanoes, about 1841 meters at their highest point, in southwestern Miyagi Prefecture, along the border with Yamagata Prefecture. In the 1620s, it was very active. In the spring of 1623, a particularly large eruption began, depositing volcanic ash across Katta and Shibata counties. The eruptions and tremors continued through 1624 unabated, and the erupting volcano was visible even from Sendai, about 25 miles (40km) away as the crow flies. It was generally an intimidating sight, to be sure, but it was also a danger to the population and a threat to the agricultural base from which the domain, and indeed any domain in Edo period Japan, derived the base of its income from which it did things like pay its retainers their stipend.

With such a very long period of eruption, Masamune sought to secure supernatural means to quell the threat. He ordered Wang Yi to go perform rituals at the mountain to get the eruption to stop. Together with Wang Yi, Masamune’s seventh son Munetaka also went, as a representative of his father. Munetaka was 17 at the time, but was already master of his own 30,000-koku landholding within Sendai domain, residing at Murata Castle in what’s now southwestern Miyagi, in the shadow of Mount Zaō. It was the people of his lands that were most directly impacted by the eruption. On November 15, 1624 (10/5/Kan’ei 1), Munetaka and Wang Yi went up to the peak of Mount Zaō at Kattamine Shrine, amidst continuing eruption and loud tremors. There, Wang Yi conducted a ritual to beseech the spirit of the mountain to please, please stop. In return, he and Munetaka pledged their lives to the mountain. And not very long after that, Mount Zaō’s eruptions and tremors stopped. The relief to everyone in the region, in Date lands as well as in the neighboring domains, must have been palpable.

But the story doesn’t end here.

Date Munetaka accompanied his father and brother to Kyoto two years later. He had a promising career ahead, and in Kyoto, the imperial court bestowed him with junior fifth court rank and the title of Uemon-dayū. But while he was still in Kyoto, Munetaka fell ill with smallpox, which was an epidemic at the time. By the western calendar, he died on October 7, 1626, at age 19, just shy of 20.

Folklorist Mihara Ryokichi puts it like this; translation mine:

“Munetaka stayed Yōhō-ji, a Hokke sect temple, while he was in Kyoto. on the 10th of the 7th month, he received the titles of Junior 5th rank lower grade and Uemon-dayu during an audience at Nijo Castle. But these felicitations were short-lived, because sadly, on the 8th of the 17th month, he died of smallpox. Dying at 20, it was an end that was in accordance with the plea he made to Mount Zaō.”

I don’t know the specifics of what kind of ritual that Wang Yi performed, but reading Mihara’s words, I can’t help but wonder how Wang Yi himself died.

As is well known, Munetaka’s father himself had survived smallpox as a child, so I have to imagine that the loss of his son was especially devastating for Masamune, who wasn’t able to leave Kyoto until two months later, owing to obligations to the court and the shogun. Despite this, retired shogun Tokugawa Hidetada came to offer personal condolences, as did many others to Masamune’s estate in Kyoto. It was during this time that Masamune received his highest court rank– Chūnagon, or Middle Councilor– but the honor must have rung especially hollow coming in the midst of the loss of a son.

When at last he could leave, Masamune wrote the following poem to the imperial prime minister:

kyou idete

asu yori nochi wa

sode no tsuyu

hosu koto araji

akasu wakare ni

I set out today,

and from tomorrow on

I shall not dry the dew on my sleeves

to make plain my parting

“Dew on sleeves”– “sode no tsuyu”– is a well established poetic allusion to weeping. I think we can get a sense of just how deeply his son’s loss had shaken the man.

By the time Masamune returned to Sendai, Munetaka was already buried. Junshi– following one’s lord in death– was forbidden at the time, and Masamune made a personal request of one of his vassals, Takeyama Shuri, to stop any of Munetaka’s retainers who may have wanted to do so. But this was in vain, and ten of Munetaka’s retainers did indeed follow their master in death. Munetaka’s wetnurse, Lady O-Acha, was first among them, and is still the only woman during the history of Sendai domain to commit junshi. Also following Munetaka in death were his chief councilor Fukuchi Ukon, as well as Akasaka Hyōbu, Takahashi Seizaburō, Aburai Gorōsuke, Higa Jūzō, Arimi Kanpei, Kayano Gonshichi, Sato Gonshirō, Sai Tango, who had all been on duties that kept them especially close to him.

Munetaka and his ten retainers who committed junshi rest in Ryutoin, a temple that still stands in the town of Murata, Miyagi Prefecture. And up on Kattamine Shrine on Mount Zaō, which hasn’t erupted since April 16, 1940, there remains a small memorial mound called Uemon-zuka, where Munetaka and Wang Yi made their pact with the mountain. There are several generations of monuments to Munetaka around here, built in the style of Japanese Buddhist gravestones. Currently standing the tallest is one that dates to Showa 42– 1967– and is a black stone monument bearing the original Date crest– three vertical bands in a circle– carries the inscription Date Munetaka-kō Myōgan no Seki, written in the calligraphic hand of Takahashi Shintarō, then governor of Miyagi Prefecture. It’s a little hard to translate myōgan succinctly, but the inscription means Site of where Lord Date Munetaka Made his Life-Offering Plea.

Even all these years later, the people of what used to be the Date lands remember him, and the bargain he made.

Sources

• Date Chike Kiroku, Vol. 1, pp. 546-547.
• “Meikun Date Munetaka-kō,” Ryutoin.jp https://ryutoin.jp/meikun/index.htm Accessed 29 April 2021
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyōdoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hobundo, Showa 58 [1983]), pp. 8-11, 47-50.
• “Suzume odori towa.” Sendai Suzume Odori http://suzume-odori.com/suzumeodori.html Accessed 29 April 2021
• “Zaōzan, Yūshi Irai no Kazan Katsudō” Japan Meteorological Agency https://www.data.jma.go.jp/svd/vois/data/sendai/212_Zaozan/212_history.html Accessed 29 April 2021.

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There’s a concept in Japanese religion called kotodama. It’s the idea that words have spirit– they have power. In the interest of a formal definition by people who specialize in Shinto studies, kotodama defined by Kokugakuin’s Encyclopedia of Shinto: 

Kotodama refers to the spiritual power that is contained within words, but also refers to the conception that spiritual power can be manifested through the intonation of words. 

While one interpretation of this can take a more supernatural tack, another is much more practical: words have some measure of power even in a mundane sense, so it’s best to watch your choice of words. That being said, Japanese has a lot of homophones. Some of them sound like ruling family names and their court titles, and it’s here that our story begins this week.

Let’s back up just a bit to the Heian era, first. Stay with me– I promise it’ll make some kind of sense.

So. Mutsu Province– Mutsu-no-kuni– was an old imperial province spanning the entirety of the modern Tohoku region’s Pacific Coast; the other one being Dewa Province, on the Sea of Japan coast. Its territory now comprises the territorial extents of Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima Prefectures. As one of two provinces in northern Honshu, it was originally called Michinoku, because it was michi no oku– beyond where the road from Kyoto ended in Shirakawa, and was thus the outback to the imperial court. It was a frontier province so it wasn’t exactly like other imperial provinces, in that its administration was partly military. Still, as with the other imperial provinces, it was governed by an imperial governor– as with other governorates, this ended in no kami, ergo the governor of Mutsu was Mutsu no kami. And long after governorships became sinecures, the title survived. While not all Edo period daimyo’s imperial titles corresponded to the province they lived in, sometimes they did. This was the case with the house of Date, whose ruling lord held the title of Mutsu no kami.

Referring to a daimyo by their given name was rude and exceedingly familiar, of course. That being the case, court title was one way that people (not everyone) referred to a daimyo. Starting in the early 17th century, the Shogunate promulgated laws like the Buke Shohatto and Kinchu narabini kuge shohatto, which strictly regulated not only the imperial court but also the purview of the Emperor and the constraints of granting and inheritance of imperial titles by people in the warrior caste. So with domain, Shogunate, and imperial bureaucracy tied up in all of it, one didn’t just simply throw this or any other title around. The house of Date itself also carefully regulated the use of the word “Mutsu” and other words intersecting with the family names or court titles of the daimyo’s immediate family. Of particular interest to it were the titles of Mutsu no kami, held by the ruling lord, as well as Mimasaka no kami and Echizen no kami, two alternate titles that were held by the lord’s heir apparent. So a Sendai merchant or craftsman couldn’t have any of those province names in their business’s name or displayed on their shop curtain (noren). According to folklorist and local historian Mihara Ryokichi, anyone who was in violation of this regulation would be identified by the city magistrate’s patrol officers and investigated by the magistrate’s office. More than a few people ran afoul of this prohibition particularly early in the Edo period.

But there’s plenty of words in Japanese that only happen to overlap because they’re homophones– this is, after all, partly the basis of how Japanese poetry works, too, and how puns are so easy to make. So, you may well ask, what would people do to get around these sorts of prohibitions on certain words, and words that sound like those words?

A particularly notable case, according to Mihara, is the case of the dawn hour– by the old Japanese clock, the “rising six”– akemutsu. Remember, there’s that “mutsu” in there– a no-go, if you’re living in Date lands. But rather than phrase “six” as “mutsu,” people in Sendai learned to call that hour of the clock by the other reading of six– thus, akemutsu in Sendai was akeroku. The introduction of the western method of timekeeping notwithstanding, older people in Sendai were still calling it that into the early 20th century. Other things affected by this ban include a type of fish called mutsu, and even diapers, which with honorific are called o-mutsu to this day.

This wasn’t the only case of this kind of prohibition and enforcement; some Date vassals also did this within their territories.

Let me back up and sidebar again for a moment, here.

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. Yet it was only the seniormost– many of them cousins of the daimyo who held daimyo-level (10,000+ koku) income, who had similar prohibitions to the daimyo’s rules about commoners’ use of titles of interest like Mutsu no kami. The Date of Watari forbade commoners use the word Awa, which was part of its family head’s court title of Awa-no-kami– with the result that the grain coincidentally called awa (millet) was called kigane (“yellow-gold”) in the Watari-Date lands. In the holdings of the Wakuya-Date, the season of autumn– aki in Japanese– was called koharu (little spring) instead, in order to avoid a namespace collision with the hereditary Wakuya title of Aki no kami. And in the lands of the Watari of Sanuma (not the same as the Date of Watari!), a broom (hoki) was called a hahaki, to avoid sounding like the Watari title of Hoki no kami. In all, a heck of a lot of circumlocutions, there.

But Sendai wasn’t the only domain where this was the case, even just in northern Honshu. North of the Date lands, in the territory of lord Nanbu of Morioka, a straw overcoat was called a kera, in order to avoid using the more common term of mino, as the Nanbu lord’s hereditary court title was Mino no kami. And to the south, in nearby Nihonmatsu, home of the Niwa family, even holidays were influenced by this practice of avoiding the daimyo’s name. The house of Niwa was a daimyo family in the Edo period, which ruled the Nihonmatsu domain in what’s now Fukushima Prefecture. Its claim to fame is that it once served the house Oda of Owari Province; Niwa Nagahide was one of the clan elders who served the great Oda Nobunaga during his 16th century campaigns of unification in central Japan. Only a few decades later, the Niwa family eventually came to rule Nihonmatsu domain, a modestly sized domain– 170,000 koku, later growing to 200,000 koku– in what’s now east-central Fukushima Prefecture. Meanwhile, setsubun is a holiday that takes place today, 3 February. As a symbol of welcoming good fortune and driving away misfortune, people gather at shrines and pelt with beans people dressed as oni (ogres) while chanting “oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” (Out with the ogres! In with the fortune!) So what does setsubun have to do with house Niwa of Nihonmatsu? “Oni wa soto” (out with the ogres) sounds a lot like “O-Niwa soto” (out with the august Niwa). So in the interest of avoiding potential trouble, people in Nihonmatsu learned to talk around it, and say “Oniisodo!” (Ogres out!) as they threw their beans. Rather surprisingly, this also continued through the early 20th century!

If we stop to think about it, this sort of practice of subtly changing what we call a thing, in order to talk about that thing while talking around that thing, is not all that strange even in the modern world. On the internet, many of us have substituted letters for asterisks in a word likely to attract the wrong kind of attention– like d*gecoin or T*rkey– or have resorted to circumlocutions about political figures, like referring to holders of certain exalted offices by their number in the pr*sidential succession prior to the forty-sixth.

See what I mean?

Anyway. Thank goodness laws change– and yet, regardless of the laws in force in the world, for better and for worse, words will always have power.

Sources

• “[11-281] Nanbu Mino-no-kami” [11-281] ●南部美濃守 Center for Open Data in the Humanities. http://codh.rois.ac.jp/edo-maps/owariya/11/1851/11-281.html.ja Accessed 22 April 2021.
• “Buke Kaden: Nanbu-shi.” Harimaya.com. http://www2.harimaya.com/sengoku/html/nanbu_k.html Accessed 22 April 2021.
• “Buke Kaden: Niwa-shi.” Harimaya.com http://www2.harimaya.com/sengoku/html/niwa_k.html Accessed 22 April 2021.
• Laura S. Kaufman, “Nature, Courtly Imagery, and Sacred Meaning in the Ippen Hijiri-e,” pp. 47-75 of Flowing Traces: Buddhism in the Literary and Visual Arts of Japan, ed. James H. Sanford et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 57.
• “Kinchu narabini Kuge shohatto.” 禁中並公家諸法度 Kotobank.jp https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%A6%81%E4%B8%AD%E4%B8%A6%E5%85%AC%E5%AE%B6%E8%AB%B8%E6%B3%95%E5%BA%A6-54378 Accessed 21 April 2021.
• “Kotodama.” Encyclopedia of Shinto. https://d-museum.kokugakuin.ac.jp/eos/detail/?id=8660 Accessed 22 April 2021.
• David J. Lu. Japan: A Documentary History, Vol. 1: The Dawn of History to the Late Tokugawa Period. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), pp. 206-208.
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyodoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hobundo, Showa 58 [1983]), pp. 199-201.
• Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868. translated and edited by Gerald Groemer (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), p. 30.
• “Nihonmatsu-han no Kiso Keiseisha Niwa Mitsushige.” Nihonmatsu City. https://www.city.nihonmatsu.lg.jp/sp/page/page001289.html Accessed 22 April 2021.
• Nihonshi B Yōgoshū. (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2000), p. 133. 
• “Niwa-shi Rekidai Gazo.” Nihonmatsu City. https://www.city.nihonmatsu.lg.jp/sp/page/page001289.html Accessed 22 April 2021.
• “Oniisodo!” Nihonmatsu City. https://www.city.nihonmatsu.lg.jp/page/page001324.html Accessed 22 April 2021.
• Sendaijō to Sendairyō no Shiro, Yōgai, ed. Kobayashi Seiji (Tokyo: Meichō Shuppan, 1982)
• Takahashi Tomio,  “The Classical Polity and its Frontier,” Introduced and translated by Karl Friday. pp. 128-145 of Capital and Countryside in Japan, 300-1180, edited by Joan Piggott. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 133.
• ____, Hiraizumi: Ōshū Fujiwara-shi Yondai. (Tokyo: Kyōikusha, 1978), p. 28.
• ____, Miyagi-ken no Rekishi (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1971), pp. 145-148.
• Wadokei.org: Sharing a Passion for Japanese Edo Period Clocks https://wadokei.org/ Accessed 22 April 2021.

If the old folktales are any indicator, the gods and other supernatural beings of Japan love their sake. And sake is also an important part of Shinto ritual today. So, this week, I want to turn a little bit to talking about how the production of sake– and vinegar– and the administration of shrine and temple districts, overlaps with and changes the usual systems of political jurisdiction in the Edo period. Or to put it more plainly, where the gods are involved, even the Shogunate’s and domains’ usual rules don’t quite apply.

The Tokugawa Shogunate and many feudal domains had an administrative posting called the Office of Temples and Shrines (Jisha Bugyosho), headed by a Magistrate (bugyo) of Temples and Shrines. In the Shogunate, this was the administrator responsible for government oversight of the lands, clergy, commoners, and dependents of land belonging to or immediately surrounding Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Tokugawa house land and cities. Why, you may well ask, institute an office like this rather than trust these institutions to be self-governing? We can get a sense of this when we consider that temples and shrines before the Edo period were in some cases also very heavily armed, and could thus impose their political will at the point of spears or guns just as easily as a daimyo could. Even the powerful Oda Nobunaga, the first of the 16th century’s famous Three Great Unifiers, had a hard time fighting the armed temples of Ishiyama Honganji and Hieizan Enryakuji; Nobunaga rather infamously resorted to burning the mountain that Enryakuji sat on, with all of its people inside. So, temples and shrines that were too independent were a liability for the Shogunate as much as they were for the myriad feudal domains. The Shogunate issued many injunctions for everyone from commoners to the imperial court to the clergy. On that last point, it isssued a series of injunctions, starting in the early 17th century and reaffirmed at the start of each shogun’s reign, which regulated and circumscribed the activities and independence of religious institutions in Japan regardless of their particular affiliation. While doctrine and internal organization was left to the religious institutions themselves, this was as far as their independence went. Given the events of the preceding century, all of them were a potential liability. In the interest of overseeing their affairs from the governmental level, and ensuring that the larger temple-shrine complexes were never again left unwatched long enough to be a military threat, the Office of Temples and Shrines was instituted.

The Shogunate’s iteration of the Office of Temples and Shrines had four magistrates assigned concurrently, chosen from the ranks of Tokugawa vassal (fudai) daimyo and reassigned on a regular basis. For a fudai daimyo, this was not the highest office one could aim for, and while there were plenty of Temple and Shrines Magistrates who were capable administrators, most of them did not remain in the office, and went on to more senior postings in the Shogunate administration. The Office reported directly to the shogun or the head Senior Councilor who managed the shogun’s affairs, rather than to the Senior Council, to whom most of the other Shogunate administrative offices answered. Because the magistrates were daimyo, they populated the Office’s positions with people seconded from the ranks of their own retainers. On the domainal level, there was a similar division of jurisdiction when it came to where this office (which usually had the same name as the one in the Shogunate government) fit in a given domain’s apparatus and to whom it reported. So, Sendai domain, too, had a Temple and Shrine Magistrate who oversaw the land and people affiliated with those institutions, while in the Sendai Castle town, the city magistrate (or magistrates) oversaw the governance of the commoner neighborhoods, with other administrators responsible for the warrior quarters. On the level of the average city-dwelling commoner, this meant that most non-warriors lived in jurisdictions where they were governed by a city magistrate, while those in temple and shrine neighborhoods and on their lands were governed by the Magistrate of Temples and Shrines. This difference in jurisdiction was put to creative use by people in need. Even in popular depictions of the period today, you sometimes see a person on the run from the city magistrate’s authorities, taking sanctuary in temple or shrine land in order to seek justice from different, higher, arguably more impartial authority.

These neighborhoods also could and often did have privileges that the regular commoner neighborhoods did not. So, for example, let’s consider the three neighborhoods of Miyamachi, Kameoka-cho, and Hachiman-cho, in the old Sendai castle town. These were the neighborhoods of three major shrines that enjoyed the direct patronage of the Date clan: in order, Tosho-gu, Kameoka Hachiman-gu, and Osaki Hachiman-gu. While shrines and their people were naturally under the jurisdiction of the Office of Temples and Shrines in the Date lands as their counterparts in the Shogunate territories might be, in this case so too were the neighborhoods around them. And a privilege that two of the three enjoyed was brewing.

Just like today, a would-be brewery needed to get the appropriate permits from its local government to run a legal operation– after all, if you’re running a brewery on the sly, the result is moonshine. So, for a neighborhood to have permission to host breweries was quite a perk! So, Miyamachi was the one neighborhood in the Sendai castle town that had permission to brew sake, and Kameoka-cho was the neighborhood with permission to brew vinegar– that is, rice vinegar, of the sort you might still cook with today.

Brewing, like we said at the beginning, is something that’s of particular interest to the gods and important to the running of shrine ritual, as it’s a common type of ritual offering. It’s also something that was in the interest of the warrior caste to control, because it relied on rice production, which was the way that a feudal domain paid its retainers most of their stipends and was how the domains’ incomes– and thus the taxes and labor that they owed to the Shogunate– were rated. Sake was also important to the domain’s functions and its military needs as well. As we discussed in recent episodes, Sendai Castle itself had a brewery, where shortly after its establishment, Masamune personally experimented with some of what became standard sake for official Date functions. So when the domain granted special permission for brewing sake and things like vinegar that derived from sake, it was no small matter, because this was a privilege it usually guarded.

In fact, there’s a pretty noteworthy case of the house of Date doing this, which continues to the present. Stay with me, because this story’s a good one.

Shiogama Shrine– Shiogama jinja, in Japanese– is a big and very old shrine in the coastal city of Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture. It is the ichinomiya, the preeminent shrine, of the former Mutsu Province. It sat immediately northeast of what used to be the seat of imperial administration in the region in the early Heian era, which is the modern city of Tagajo, Miyagi Prefecture. The city of Shiogama, as both transport hub and a fishing port, grew around the shrine, and it predates Sendai by several centuries. It’s always been a fishing port, but it gets its name from the salt kettles (shiogama) that were historically the divine vessels in the shrine’s inner sanctum. According to shrine lore, the god of Shiogama shrine “is the kami that first cooked salt in our country. His salt kettle remains to this day as the shrine’s shintai. Its miraculous virtue is difficult to put down in ink.” In other words, the lore has it that the gods of the shrine taught the local humans how to extract salt from seawater. The same source claims that in the Edo period, there were four salt kettles that served as its divine vessels, where there were had once been seven.

The Northern Fujiwara, the Emishi-Japanese rulers of a quasi-independent Tohoku region a millennium ago, knew this shrine and cared for it during the late Heian era. And several centuries later, when the house of Date took possession of the region with aspirations to the mantle of leadership once claimed by the Northern Fujiwara, it too supported the upkeep of the shrine and even carried a banner representing its gods in the suite of banners that accompanied the Date field headquarters into battle.

One major refurbishing of Shiogama Shrine was completed in 1724, during the reign of the 5th generation Date daimyo, Date Yoshimura (1680-1752, ruled 1708- 1743). As the daimyo following the disastrous Date Disturbance which nearly destroyed the domain through internal discord, Yoshimura is chiefly remembered today for having been the lord who took personal involvement in the domain’s affairs and supervised its reestablishment on firm financial footing through things like land reclamation and the restructuring of the domain’s administration. He also oversaw the repair and reconstruction of landmarks including Shiogama Shrine. It was immediately following the completion of this construction project that Yoshimura ordered the brewing of a new type of sake for use at Shiogama Shrine’s ceremonies. This was overseen by the local Saura family, whose descendants still brew the same sake today. It’s called Urakasumi, they’re not sponsoring this podcast, but let me tell you, it’s my favorite sake ever. It’s still brewed in a brewery that’s built around the Edo period brewery. I went up the tall, narrow steps of the storehouse in 2005, and I remember the scent of the sake fermenting in these huge, wooden casks, it had a faint hint of apple.

Fortunately, not even the 2011 tsunami stopped Urakasumi. The Date government is gone, the old systems of city and temple magistrate are gone, but that sake is still in production to this day, and still relatively straightforward to get ahold of even in North America. Meanwhile, back in Sendai, Miyamachi no longer brews sake, nor does Kameoka-cho brew vinegar. But in quite the amusing twist, the most reliable online source of news on Kameoka Hachiman-gu is the website of Abe Sake-ten, a Kameoka-cho sake vendor.

I think the gods would approve.

Sources

• Abe Sake-ten. http://abesake.com/ Accessed 8 April 2021.
• RHP Mason and JG Caiger. A History of Japan: Revised Edition (Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997), p. 195.
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyōdoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hōbundō, Showa 58 [1983]), pp. 123-126.
• Sasama Yoshihiko. Edo Machibugyo Jiten. (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1995), pp. 2-3.
• “Shiogama engi.” Shinto Taikei v. .27, pp. 118-119.
• Conrad Totman. Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600-1843. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 40, 42, 137, 182.
• “Urakasumi no Rekishi: Hajime ni, Vol. 1.” https://www.urakasumi.com/about-us/history/2014/08/post-5.html Accessed 8 April 2021.

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Japanese castles of the Edo period, thanks to World Heritage sites like Himeji Castle, have a well known and very distinctive silhouette, but are not all identical.

They were, however, meant as a visible mark of a feudal lord’s power as well as a residence. And even though the Edo period was, by and large, a long period of peace, a castle was also a military nerve center and was built with the defensive architecture to underline that part of its role. Some castles were built on flat land with labyrinthine moats and high walls, while others were built into hills and mountains in order to take advantage of naturally defensible terrain. Aoba Castle, also known as Sendai Castle, was the home fortress of the house of Date during the Edo period. Its castle town became the modern city of Sendai. And our story today begins with its construction.

Mount Aoba– Aobayama– is 203.16 meters tall, and it’s really more of a hill. It stands in Aoba Ward in modern day Sendai, in a bend of the Hirose River just before the river turns south and east to where it meets the Natori River which carries its waters to the river’s mouth at Yuriage and the waiting Pacific beyond. It has a commanding view– partially obscured today by the buildings of modern downtown– of the Sendai basin. There had been a small fortification there before 1600, but it was there that Date Masamune chose to build his new castle in 1600, when he celebrated groundbreaking with a five-part Noh and amended the place’s name to its current spelling of 仙台 (仙臺 in old-form kanji): “Home of the Immortals.” As Masamune was a lover of the Chinese classics, the name should come as no surprise to those who know their Chinese classics– this is the name of the place in Journey to the West where the Monkey King steals the Peaches of Immortality. Relatedly, a common– although spoken rather than written– name for the area of the city until the mid-20th century was Rakuchu. This is still used to refer to Kyoto, but was also used to refer to Sendai starting in those early days. It positions Sendai as a successor to Luoyang (Rakuyo in Japanese), once a capital of the Eastern Han dynasty in ancient China. So in short, Masamune had grand dreams for himself and big plans for his capital.

Suzume odori-zu, from vol. 3 of Hokusai Manga, published 1815. (Image PD)

Having walked up Mount Aoba in 2005, I can tell you it’s rocky and pretty steep to get up on foot even today, with one paved road snaking up to the top, and blazed trails elsewhere. Parts of it, particularly on the west side, even have some of the area’s sections of old-growth forest. But if you’re going to build a castle on and around a hill, you have to adapt it at least a little bit, of course, in order to build residences and guard towers and gates and some measure of walls or stone platforms for all of that stuff to sit on, because hills are, y’know, uneven.

Over the course of the 1590s, Masamune had spent a great deal of time in central Japan, at Hideyoshi’s Jurakudai court in Kyoto and later at Osaka Castle, as one of Hideyoshi’s vassals and generals, including during the Imjin War.

He wanted to build something that would rival those structures that his overlord had boasted of. At this point, he was still planning on making a longshot bid to take over Japan himself, so he had the long view in mind of what image he wanted to project to the world. So he summoned stonemasons from Sakai– modern day Sakai, Osaka Prefecture– to come build the stonework of his new castle.

I should sidebar, here. Chances are, your mental image of a Japanese castle is going to look something like Himeji Castle. But not every castle in the Edo period had the iconic main tower (tenshukaku), and the tower isn’t the castle, but rather just one part of the castle. The stone base on which the walls, towers, and defensive works sit are, well, the foundation to it all. Sakai stonemasons were renowned as the best, so Masamune got Sakai stonemasons to make his new castle. But here’s the catch: once they were done, they weren’t allowed to return home. They were now privy to military secrets. To reiterate something from last week: yes, Sendai Castle was Masamune’s residence, but it was also a military installation and strategic asset, so it was a location that was off limits to people from outside Date lands. Local historian and folklorist Mihara Ryokichi notes that when the house of Date did receive dignitaries from elsewhere in Japan, any reception would happen at the Matsuyama Estate in Sendai’s Katahira district, which was the residence of the Moniwa family, a senior vassal family in service to the Date. As a family with its own income equal to that of a minor independent lord, the Moniwa’s Matsuyama Estate was quite fabulous in its own right.

But it wasn’t just “you can’t go home” and leaving them to twist in the wind. In recognition of the stonemasons’ service, and perhaps in recompense for preventing them from returning home, Masamune stipended them as his clan’s official stonemasons, and gave them a neighborhood as their own.

Let’s be real. I have to wonder if they knew from the beginning that this was a one-way trip to Sendai. I have to wonder how they must’ve felt when they got the news. Even if it meant getting a permanent stipend, a permanent gig, and a neighborhood all their own, it couldn’t have been easy. I feel for these stonemasons.

So. When the stonemasons finished their work, Masamune organized a celebration– and remember, this is a man who was notorious even in his time for his love of parties and his skill with drumming. He’s also the man who had a brewery built into said brand-new castle. So with the stonemasons and the dignitaries rip-roaring drunk– the story has it that Masamune played the taiko personally at this party– the stonemasons performed an improvised dance whose motions resembled the flapping and flitting of sparrows in flight. Because the main Date crest since Masamune’s father’s time was, and still is, an image of two sparrows encircled in bamboo, the name “sparrow dance” (suzume odori すずめ踊り) stuck. These stonemasons’ descendants continued in Date service and continued to preserve the dance, which is how we have it today.

The castle that these stonemasons helped build survived through the end of the Edo period and the pensioning off of the house of Date into the modern system of Japanese nobility. But it remained a strategically important location. The IJA took over the castle site, and remade its outer baileys into the headquarters of the Second Infantry Division, which survived until 1945. At war’s end, the US Army took possession of the castle site and the outer baileys became home to the US Army’s Camp Sendai, one of the US occupation forces’ 13 bases in the prefecture. After the US withdrew, the area finally passed from military use. Today, parts of it are a botanical garden, parts of it are a park, other parts are residences. And rather prominently, the core of the old US military base is now the campus of Tohoku University’s Kawauchi Campus. As a patron of the podcast put it recently over Twitter, just because there’s been a regime change doesn’t necessarily mean that a strategically important position is going to be abandoned completely.

So anyway. Having said all of that. Why, you may well ask, does the Sparrow Dance matter?

Fast forward to the early Meiji era. There were many shrines established starting in the 1870s to enshrine the deified founders of local ruling clans, and Sendai was no exception. The house of Date had sought permission from the Shogunate in the 1860s to establish this shrine. But the political turmoil of the 1860s as well as the clan’s straitened financial circumstances meant that neither the Shogunate nor the house of Date could afford the time, energy, or money to invest in the task– and of course, then the Boshin War happened and broke large swaths of northern Honshu. But in 1874, the imperial government allowed for the founding of Aoba Shrine, which still exists and still enshrines Masamune today. One of its major festivals, in the late spring, was the Aoba Festival– named for the shrine, which was named for the castle– which drew on the longer tradition of the Sendai Festival, an earlier spring festival held at Toshogu Shrine, across town in Miyamachi district. Toshogu enshrined the deified Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and Sendai Festival began in 1654, and because of the alternate-attendance system that took the ruling Date lord away from Sendai on a regular basis, was held every other year when he was in town.

In the festival procession through the Sendai streets, people in straw hats and hanten coat danced the Sparrow Dance, kept alive for all those years by the descendants of the same stonemasons. In 1985, the city adopted it as a local civic holiday and festival, celebrating not just the city’s founder but also the city’s culture and long history in general. It’s now called the Sendai Aoba Festival, and is still held every year in May.

YouTube has many videos of the Sparrow Dance from many years of the Aoba Festival. Teams from neighborhoods, schools, and businesses compete in variations of the original, base form of the dance. I encourage you to go look it up and take a moment to appreciate it. There’s a common component drawn from the original Sparrow Dance, but every team gets to riff on that in other sections of their presentation.

One of the first bits of Sendai culture I saw on display– performed by some visiting students from Tohoku Gakuin University, nearly two decades ago– was the Sparrow Dance. And now that I know the story of the stonemasons’ impromptu dance with the man who’d brought them on a one-way trip so far from home, I feel like there’s a measure of emotional heft that accompanies it.

Incidentally, parts of the old stonemasons’ neighborhood, especially side streets? They still bear the name Ishikiri-cho– Stonecutter Town. They’re now part of Hachiman-cho 2-chome, in Sendai’s Aoba Ward.

So remember, if you would, the stonemasons of Sakai, so far from home. They were the ones who laid the foundation for the castle and for the dance of the city that the castle helped build.

I’m Nyri, and this has been #FridayNightHistory.

Now– questions?

Sources

• “A History of Sendai Aoba Matsuri.” http://www.aoba-matsuri.com/english/e-history.html Accessed 1 April 2021.
• “Dōro no tsūshō toshite katsuyō suru rekishiteki chōmei no yurai (Ishikiri-dōri)” Sendai City. https://www.city.sendai.jp/kosekijumin/kurashi/machi/machizukuri/rekishi/katsuyo/rosenme/agyo/yurai2.html Accessed 1 April 2021.
• Mihara Ryōkichi. Kyodoshi Sendai Mimibukuro. (Sendai: Hobundo, Showa 58 [1983]), pp. 47-50
• “Kawauchi Campus: History.” Tohoku University http://campus.bureau.tohoku.ac.jp/en_campusguide/en_kaw_history.html Accessed 31 March 2021.
• “Sendai Matsuri no Ayumi.” Sendai Toshogu. http://s-toshogu.jp/festival/fes-history/ Accessed 1 April 2021.
• “Suzume odori towa.” Sendai Suzume Odori http://suzume-odori.com/suzumeodori.html Accessed 1 April 2021.
• “US Army in Japan, 1945-” https://www.usarj.army.mil/Portals/33/about/history/major_units_and_installations_201806.pdf Accessed 20 March 2021.
• “Yuisho.” Aoba Shrine. https://www.aoba-jinja.com/%e7%94%b1%e7%b7%92/ Accessed 1 April 2021.

Last week, we talked about the Phaeton Incident, where during the Napoleonic Wars in 1808, Fleetwood Broughton Reynolds Pellew took his Royal Navy warship into Nagasaki harbor, kidnapped a couple of Dutch merchants, and almost provoked a war because of a lack of common language. While the incident ultimately only took the life of then-Nagasaki magistrate Matsudaira Yasuhide, it exposed the Shogunate’s weakness to protect against foreign incursion, as well as its interpreters’ lack of any meaningful familiarity with the English language. The Shogunate immediately changed the military disposition of forces in the Nagasaki area, as well as the signalling system used by the coast guard fortifications, but it also turned its attention to improving its translators’ familiarity with English.

Now, before we talk about English, we have to talk a little bit about European languages in Japan up to that point. By 1808, the European language with the longest history in Japan was Portuguese. It had been the language of some of the friars who had visited Japan during the 16th century, though the Portuguese and Spaniards were later banned from Japan, and Portuguese it remains the source of several Japanese loan words, including ubiquitous ones like “tempura” and “pan.” There was also some awareness of Russian by 1808, as the Russian imperial navy made several forays into Ezochi (modern Hokkaido) and encountered troops of northern Honshu domains sent there for coast guard duty. But while there had been a few Englishmen in 17th century Japan, and indeed they’d once had a trading post in Nagasaki themselves, they’d lost interest and left the Dutch– who’d been in Japan since the very late 16th century– the sole European country trading with Japan.

By the 19th century, the study of European language, technology, medicine, and more, was all shorthanded as rangaku– Dutch studies– and regardless of the country of origin of a given thing, it was the Dutch studies scholars that were the authority on it and who usually worked with it. After the Phaeton Incident, the Shogunate established the Office for Translation of Barbarian Books (Bansho Wage Goyō), and it would be rangaku scholars who were significantly involved in its operation: Takahashi Kageyasu, Baba Teiyū, Ōtsuki Gentaku, Aochi Rinsō were its central figures; it would later become the Office for Research of Barbarian Books (Bansho Shirabesho). Meanwhile, the Shogunate also ordered the compilation of English dictionaries and the general improvement of its interpreters’ ability in English.

And it was to one such scholar, Motoki Shōzaemon, to whom fell the task of leading the compilation of the first Japanese-English dictionary. Motoki, son of an earlier Nagasaki based interpreter named Motoki Yoshinaga (1735-1794), was part of a family had been in the translation business for generations– first from Portuguese, then from Dutch. Motoki’s translations included Nieuwe richt der bosschilgieterij kunst by Gerrit van der Torren, which was translated as Kaigan Hojutsu Biyo, and was one of the texts on foreign military methods that influenced the Shogunate’s attempts at military reform.

Motoki studied English with Jan Cock Blomhoff (1779-1853), the director (opperhoofd) of the Dutch trading facility in Nagasaki, who had some command of English. Blomhoff succeeded Hendrik Doeff, who we learned about last week as the embattled director of the facility during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, but had himself previously been a director of the same facility some years prior. Unlike any of his predecessors, on his second trip to Japan, Blomhoff went to Nagasaki with his wife Titia Bergsma, infant son Johannes, and Johannes’ wetnurse Petronella Muns, as well as an Indonesian maid named Marathy and a young male Javanese servant whose name I haven’t been able to track down. The household attracted the attention of the Japanese people it came in contact with, and Bergsma and Muns were the first Western women to have visited Japan, and were a popular topic of portraiture at the time.

A product of Motoki’s study with Blomhoff was the compilation of A Japanese Interpretation of the English Language (Angeria Kokugo Wage 諳厄利亜国語和解, hereafter Interpretation) in 1811, soon followed by A Collection of English Words– or more literally, A Collected Forest of English (Angeria Gorin Taisei 諳厄利亜語林大成) in 1814. You can check out a fully digitized copy of Interpretation here: http://base1.nijl.ac.jp/iview/Frame.jsp?DB_ID=G0003917KTM&C_CODE=0091-027402 For their combined work in compiling Interpretation, the Shogunate rewarded Motoki and Blomhoff both. Motoki received 10 pieces of silver, while Blomhoff was presented with 50 bags of charcoal. 

Interpretation comprised ten volumes. It offers not just definitions but an introduction to the English alphabet, all of them Dutch-tinged owing to Motoki’s study with a non-native speaker. Parts of Interpretation are just words with a single word definition in Japanese, while other parts of it are more like a phrasebook. Some examples include– and I haven’t corrected these, so if you’re listening to the podcast, check out the blogpost to see the spellings, which are close but not quite right– “what time my one find you at home?” and “you shall be well come” “sir, I am much beholding to you that you do take that pains for me,” “It is true, Sir Palmer Fairbrun, all the town did much lamant for his death,” and “without doubt, it was a brave action, and to say the truth, the English fought as they uso to do, like lions.” Rather rough-hewn, and not quite a dictionary in the strictest sense– reading the scanned document, I find myself wondering just how much use the Shogunate honestly expected to get out of it. But Motoki built upon it in a few short years, presenting the Shogunate with A Forest of English a few years later in 1814. A Forest of English was upwards of 6000 words, and for this, he was again rewarded by the Shogunate, this time with fifteen pieces of silver. And unlike Interpretation, it was Japan’s first actual English-Japanese dictionary. This, like its predecessor, also had plenty of flaws, starting from the pronunciation, which remained Dutch-tinged.

Japanese study of English continued piecemeal mostly through books over the ensuing decades and improved in fits and starts. Visitors during those years, some of which overlapped with the No Second Thoughts order that we talked about in a recent episode, noted that there was some knowledge of English among Japanese interpreters whom they encountered. You might recall that during his July 1846 visit to Uraga attempting to open trade negotiations, US Commodore James Biddle was given a message in English from the Shogunate officials. This is how Sakamaki Shunzo reproduces it in his 1939 dissertation on Japan-US Relations:

According to the Japanese laws, the Japanese may not trade, except with the Dutch and Chinese. It won’t be allowed that America make a treaty with Japan or trade with her, as the same is not allowed to any other nation. Concerning strange lands, all things are fixed at Nangasacki, but not here in the bay ; therefore you must depart as quick as possible, and not come any more in Japan.

This is the English translation of a Japanese original which Sakamaki renders into English as follows.

At this time you are said to have requested saying that you wish to trade with our country. But, as the laws strictly forbid new intercourse and commerce with foreign nations, you should set sail at once. In recent years, several times have countries asked for trade, but these requests have been made in vain, and it will be the same with your country, no matter how many times you may come again. The national laws provide that matters concerning foreign countries shall be handled at Nagasaki, so that such matters are not handled here at Uraga. Never come again with requests, for there can be no settlement if you come here.

It wasn’t until Ranald MacDonald’s whirlwind visit– and subsequent incarceration in Nagasaki– in 1848 that English language instruction by a native speaker first came to Japan. Where Motoki’s study had been with a non-native speaker and study in the years that followed were either through more non-native speakers or alternatively the written word, MacDonald was at last able to offer pointers on improved grammar and spelling, and also correct pronunciation. He even notes that some of his students picked up American naval slang, words like “grog” and “shiver me timbers.”

Fourteen men studied with MacDonald while he waited under guard for the next American vessel to take him home. His students were Nishi Yoichirō, Uemura Sakushichirō, Nishi Keitarō, Ogawa Keijūrō, Shioya Tanesaburō, Nakayama Hyōma, Inomata Dennosuke, Shizuki Tatsuichirō, Iwase Yashirō, Hori Ichirō, Shige Takanosuke, Namura Tsunenosuke, Moriyama Einosuke, and Motoki Shōzaemon. Now, here I have to say, I was mistaken: this was not the same Motoki Shōzaemon, but rather the son of the one who compiled the dictionary– their names are pronounced the same but the “shō” of “Shōzaemon” spelled differently– this one’s name is spelled 昌左衛門 where his father’s was 庄左衛門. This Motoki Shōzaemon was the father of Motoki Shōzō (1824-1875), who continued the family tradition in study of English and work as a translator and interpreter for the Shogunate until its demise.

Today, of course, things are different. We can fire up an app or a browser and translate between Japanese and English and back again with near-instantaneous speed, or look up words we might be missing and do it just as fast. But the elder Motoki Shōzaemon’s Angeria Kokugo Wage was a beginning.

I’m Nyri, and this has been #FridayNightHistory.

Now– questions?

Sources

• “Acceptance of Western Military Science at the End of Edo Period,” from Japan-Netherlands Exchange in the Edo Period. https://www.ndl.go.jp/nichiran/e/s2/s2_5.html Accessed 4 March 2021.
• “Bansho Wage Goyōgakari,” Kotobank.jp https://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%95%83%E6%9B%B8%E5%92%8C%E8%A7%A3%E5%BE%A1%E7%94%A8%E6%8E%9B-1580151 Accessed 4 March 2021.
• “Boom in Dutch Studies,” from Japan-Netherlands Exchange in the Edo Period https://www.ndl.go.jp/nichiran/e/s1/s1_3.html Accessed 4 March 2021.
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