For those who are new around here: FNH was an off the cuff series of Friday night Twitter threads, which I began in a bar while watching furries sing karaoke. I felt like opining about something in my historical wheelhouse, and so I did a thread, which grew into a series, which became something of a phenomenon.
But burnout is a hell of a thing.
Also, my work with Unseen Japan has increased, and a lot of what I was doing for Friday Night History, has been going to Unseen Japan. However, while the focus overlaps, there are some things that work better here than there, where the focus is more on news first and then on culture and history. So I think I have a clearer sense of where to draw the line.
And I’ve got my first few episodes on the way.
Here’s what I have planned: doing them in sets of 3, queueing them up for release on the Anchor side, and doing threads on Mastodon, and blogpost on WordPress, in an evolution of what I used to do on Twitter.
Unlike Cleyera, which is an unscripted podcast, this is a scripted podcast, and will remain so— thus, you can expect to find transcripts, for this, as a regular feature. However, because of Cleyera, my editing skills have improved since you last saw me on this feed.
The subject matter will be one-off Japanese history and culture content, at least for the moment— I began an epic Boshin War series, I know, but I think that’s something best saved for later, when I’m a little less scrambling to fundraise and keep the lights on.
Of course, all of this is only possible at all, thanks to listeners like you, especially regular patrons at patreon.com/riversidewings
Our first 3 episodes back will be about the mail between Sendai and Edo, about the Tohoku version of okonomiyaki, and about how you might recognize the procession of Lord Date from a distance if you saw him coming in or going out of Edo in the Edo period (the smoke, it’s the smoke!).
Thank you for your listenership all these many years.
Folks! I have news! #FridayNightHistory now goes up exclusively on Patreon as public posts! You can catch the episodes since the last I posted here via the following links:
Updates will continue here as the new episodes go up, but will link to the Patreon side. Other posts will continue here on WordPress, as this is my primary public-facing blog. Thank you so much for reading the series, and please consider becoming a patron, becoming a Twitch subscriber, or sending a one-time donation via bit.ly/2lQfdZ8.
Your support makes all of this possible. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings.
Mount Aoba. 203.16 meters in height, its peak has a commanding view of most of modern Sendai. It is home to museums, two major shrines, historic ruins, and some of Sendai city’s old growth forest. Today, much of its significance to Sendai city comes from its history as the site of Aoba Castle, the Date clan’s seat of government and residence during the Edo period. We’ve talked about various aspects of its history over the length of this podcast and its prior history as a Twitter-only thread. It’s to be expected of course, given the Tohoku and Date focus of Friday Night History, but still, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually tried to sketch out an overall history of Mount Aoba itself. So, let’s try and do that inside of the usual timespan of one of these episodes, shall we? Some of what you’ll hear will be familiar, but some will be new.
So let’s talk Mount Aoba.
Interestingly, the fact that it’s now called Mount Aoba at all only dates to 1602! In that year, the house of Date moved a temple from Mount Shinobu in what’s now Fukushima Prefecture to the slopes of this hill inside the Hirose riverbend. By then, the Date castle there was already under construction, and the stonemasons– who also came up with the Sparrow Dance, as we discovered in the episode on the topic– invited up from Sakai to build the castle’s walls. The temple was called Jakko-ji, but its sango, its mountain name, was Seiyozan. Seiyozan is the on-yomi of the characters otherwise read as Aobayama. And thus, Mount Aoba received its name. Also interestingly, this was not the first temple there, nor was Sendai Castle the first castle, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
According to Tohoku University’s campus guide, some of the oldest artifacts found onsite are earthware and stoneware dating back to the Jomon period (14000-1000 BCE) at six locations; the artifacts themselves are between 5000-2000 years old. So, its inhabitation by humans goes a long way back.
By the Nara period, this area and points north were being actively colonized by the Yamato state. Northern Honshu’s original people were the Emishi. There is rich archaeological evidence from digs around Kawauchi– the riverbend within which Mount Aoba sits– that suggests that it continued to be a location of both residence as well as places of worship. The region was under the control of the mixed Emishi-Yamato Northern Fujiwara clan in the Heian era, the clan that merged Japanese and non-Japanese sources of political legitimacy in order to justify its semi-independent rule of the northeast in those years. While they were deposed by the attack of Minamoto no Yoritomo during the Bunji War, the region remained semi-independent, far from the imperial center, and Mount Aoba and the Kawauchi area continued to be actively inhabited and used as a site of worship. Tohoku University notes that there are stone monuments there called Itabi– tall, column-like stelae– dating to the Kamakura era (1185-1333), and still located in the botanical gardens there today.
Edo period map of Sendai Castle and Mount Aoba. To the right is the bend of the Hirose River. (image in PD)
While Sendai Castle’s ruins still dominate the peak of Mount Aoba, it wasn’t the only fortification that’s ever been there. There had been a small fortification there before 1600, whose name is deceptively similar to the modern city’s name, but which was written with the kanji that translate as “a thousand generations.” If you’re listening to the podcast, check out the blogpost to see what I mean– 千代 rather than 仙台․ This was a small fort controlled by the Kokubun family, which was a local lordly family during the Muromachi period. As noted in some past episodes, the Kokubun family eventually became mediated– that is, absorbed via intermarriage– into the house of Date. Also on Mount Aoba at the time was a temple to Kokuzo Bosatsu– the bodhisattva Akasagarbha, bodhisattva of space– and one period source says that the bodhisattva as enshrined there had “a thousand forms”– which is another interesting pun on the later city’s name. “Thousand forms” is “Sentai” 千体 — which scans neatly into 千代 and then 仙台․ Again, if you’re listening to the podcast version of this thread, check out the blogpost– these are three different homophones, three different spellings.
It was there on that hill, still not known by its modern name– that Date Masamune chose to build his new castle in late 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.
While Sendai never quite became the sort of capital for which Masamune would have hoped, it remained the capital of Japan’s third largest feudal domain, after Kaga and Satsuma domains. It was, among other things, the birthplace of Russian studies in Japan, as well as the site of Japan’s first miso factory. Sendai Castle and Mount Aoba were the Date clan’s residence, but they were also a military installation and strategic asset, so they were 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.
The castle remained in Date hands through the end of the Boshin War. Some, but not all, of the Date command during the Boshin War, was coordinated from Mount Aoba, though some of it was also nearer to the battlefront at Shiroishi Castle, in the southern end of the domain. At war’s end, it was surrendered to the imperial government, and the domain-turned-prefecture’s administration was relocated across town to Yokendo, the Date domain school, on whose footprint more or less the prefectural government is still located, at Kotodai Park just north of Sendai Station.
Between the end of the Boshin War and the end of the Second World War, Mount Aoba and the Kawauchi area were for the most part a military base, the headquarters of the Sendai Garrison, which became the Imperial Army’s Second Infantry Division. 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.
On the peak of Mount Aoba today sits a museum focused on the Date clan’s history, alongside Miyagi Gokoku Shrine. And there near the edge of the walls on a high stone plinth, the equestrian statue of Date Masamune looks out over the city that still bears the mark of those long-ago grand plans for making a second Luoyang. There was an original statue identical to this one that once occupied the same plinth, but which was melted down during the Second World War for use of its metals. The current statue was recast, in the same mold, after the war. I remember standing in its shadow in 2005, the day I first visited Mount Aoba, and thinking “this is a fittingly sized statue for the man’s personality.”
At the foot of Mount Aoba is the Sendai City Museum, which still preserves many treasures of the city, the region, and the Date clan. Masamune’s famous armor with the crescent-moon helmet crest “lives” there. And I suspect the man would’ve been proud that so much of the hill that his family called home, is still a place of quiet, contemplation, and culture.
Yamada Kiichi. “Sendai Bussan Enkaku.” pp. 343-389 of Sendai Sōsho Besshū Dai 2kan. (Sendai: Sendai Sōsho Kankōkai, 1922), archived at https://archive.org/details/s1sendaisos02suzu pp. 372-373
Folks, this is a post to explain the new goal on the Patreon at http://patreon.com/riversidewings and to talk a bit about what you’re making possible and where I hope to take things.
Right now, we’re at $666, and it’s helping me devote more time to creating Friday Night History, my book projects, art, and more. I’ve been able to afford tools like new brushes, a podcasting microphone, and licenses for apps like ClipStudio Paint, where earlier, I’d have had to make do with bare minimum of tools to get by, and focus more on just surviving. You helped make Grey Dawn happen. You helped make Friday Night History go from a thread to a podcast. As I always say, you’re the wind beneath my wings.
I want to keep growing what I do– I want to devote more time to this work. This is my passion, but interacting with you all– here, on Twitter, on Discord, on Twitch, and elsewhere — is also a joy. The more of you sign up here, the closer I get to making this my full-time focus, and doing still more. This is not a hobby. This is how I make a significant portion of my livelihood.
There’s so much I want to do! I’d like to pay to enter my books and podcasts in more award competitions. I’d like to buy a PO Box so y’all can send me books and games to review. I’d like to be able to afford ads on social media. I’d like to travel, and to buy books and make photocopies that I count on for making this content. So truly, your support is bringing me closer to all of that.
With that in mind, an explanation of the next few goals and perks on Patreon.
At $750, I’ll begin a once-a-month cooking stream. The plan is to cook something historical, and to talk in realtime about it, probably on Twitch. Right now, we’re about $84 away from this.
At that point, I will also be able to start looking at buying some modest, initial adspace– all the better to bring new listeners and readers to the podcast and my books. I’ve already begun laying the groundwork for the support I’ll need at that point– the mods I’ve brought onboard over on Twitch and on Discord are part of that.
At $800/month I’ll be able to set up a PO Box, which will give you a place to direct your mail– books you’d like me to review, or video games or movies. Right now we’re about $134 away from this.
It will also make possible physical rewards. Pencil and ink sketches at first, once a month, but also stickers, and other merch.
When we hit $1000/month, this will be close to being my day job! and at that point, I will edit, record, and release pre-2021 #FridayNightHistory threads as podcasts– stuff like The Ninja that Met James Buchanan, or The Gang Goes to War Over a Tree. Right now we’re about $333 away from this.
Beyond that, this effectively becomes my day job, and we can talk further about goals when we get there.
But for now, this is what’s on deck.
So. If you like my work on #FridayNightHistory. If you read #GreyDawn. If you want to see #TheSparrowsDream and other history writing of mine make it to publication. If you want to get early glimpses of my second novel #HomewardStars as I write it: please spread the word.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at two cartographers of the late Edo period, Ino Hanzaemon and his disciple Mamiya Rinzo: their mapmaking endeavors and those maps’ influence on late 18th century Shogunate foreign policy and border defense, particularly in Ezochi: Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurile islands. This week we’re going to look at another facet of the Japanese response to these concerns around foreign interactions, by examining the work of Sendai retainer and military scholar Hayashi Shihei (1738-1793). His story is a bit different than that of Ino and Mamiya. Where Ino and Mamiya enjoyed Shogunal sanction and their work almost immediately became objects of supreme national security, Hayashi– working for a daimyo, speaking a little *too* stridently about national defense shortcomings– ran afoul of the Shogunate and eventually caused his arrest and imprisonment. A modern Japanese saying has it that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down (Deru kugi wa utareru). In all his eccentricity and all his scholarly excellence, Hayashi was the nail that got hammered down. But his observations were solid and his recommendations prescient, and he not only went on to influence late Edo military science and reforms, but also remains a hometown hero in Sendai. I first saw a bas-relief sculpture of him on Mount Aoba, in 2005. Not bad for an adopted child of Sendai! In short, because of the warnings from Hayashi and others, the Shogunate eventually wisened up and began to implement some mapping projects and defensive improvements in response.
But with that said, let’s get this story rolling, shall we?
Hayashi Shihei was born in Edo in 1738, to the Okamura family, a house of Tokugawa vassals. But the elder Okamura left Shogunate service and a modest stipend, and soon went north to Sendai, where his brother, Hayashi Jugo, served house Date as a doctor. He was hired as a Date vassal in 1756, with a modest stipend of 150 koku, which put him near the bottom tier of vassals in this major domain. However, his family connections brought him much more access than would be afforded to someone of such modest means and of non-Sendai roots; his elder sister Nao, later called Kiyo, had originally worked in the Date estate in Edo, and after the family’s move to Sendai, became a concubine of the 6th Sendai lord, Date Munemura. Thanks to her connections to the very top of the domain’s governing figures and samurai society, the family moved to Kawauchi, the area inside a bend of the Hirose River where the estates of senior Date vassals encircle the foot of Mount Aoba, where the Date castle was located.
Otsuki Bankei’s portrait of Hayashi Shihei. (Source)
Hayashi’s two great works are Sangoku Tsuran Zusetsu (An Illustrated Description of the Three Countries), published 1786, and Kaikoku Heidan (A Maritime Country’s Strategic Discourse), published 1792. In both, he outlined the affairs and current state of Japan, Korea, and China, and argued– stridently– that Japan was at risk from the north, from Russian expansionism. Hayashi’s life is almost exactly coterminous with that of Catherine the Great, after all, under whose leadership the Russian empire expanded significantly and during which time Russia also took its first forays into studying the Japanese language and culture, primarily through the aid of Japanese castaways rescued by Russians.
In order to deal with the threat posed by Russia, Hayashi urged the Shogunate to bolster coastal defense, and to improve military capability by focusing on unit drill rather than on individual martial prowess. Because of the predilection in some quarters to assume that all samurai were individualistic glory-hogs with no idea of unit-based combat, let me remind you that unit-based drill even under traditional systems of Japanese strategy did exist and were fielded, most famously during the Warring States era. But Hayashi was living in the Edo era, under what Western scholars have taken to calling the Pax Tokugawa– training in military arts was primarily undertaken by the individual and not in units, though as discussed in the episode on falconry, unit based training was implemented at least some of the time, disguised as a daimyo’s falconry trips. As a means toward improving Japan’s military strength and bolstering its defense, he also advocated changes to the policy of national seclusion which would have meant significantly greater and more regular Japanese interaction with the outside world. Of course, in order to do these things, the Shogunate’s and the feudal lords’ finances would have to improve in order to be able to foot the bill. To that end, in a memorial he presented to the Date lord, Hayashi also critiqued the system of alternate-attendance under which daimyo were obliged to travel to and from the Shogun’s capital at great expense. This was designed by the Shogunate to keep them spending on pomp and travel rather than on potentially fomenting uprisings, but in the light of what Hayashi saw as a very clear and very present threat, that wasn’t good enough– priorities needed reorganization in order to adequately provide for the national defense.
But while we can, with hindsight, know that he was right, this is also where he ran into problems. Even if his criticisms and calls to action were valid, even if the threat was real, he had spoken too loudly for someone of his relatively modest station even as a samurai. For this, he was imprisoned in 1793. While in confinement, he famously wrote
I have no parents, no wife, no children, no printing block, no money, but I also have no desire for death.
親も無し 妻無し子無し版木無し 金も無けれど死にたくも無し
And from this short declaration, took the style, or pen name, Rokumusai– “Rokumu” is written “Six No’s”. But after a brief confinement, he died later in the same year. And yet, in time, even the Shogunate heeded his words.
It wasn’t that it had much of a choice, if truth be told. For one thing, the Russian incursions particularly to the north only increased, and together with those of British and later American vessels, this was clearly and obviously a problem that the Shogunate eventually knew that it couldn’t ignore. We’ve talked about these incidents and about some of the Shogunate’s response in past episodes, including its initial halting attempts at building an English dictionary. Russian studies in Japan began under the rectorship of Otsuki Jukusai at Yokendo, the Sendai domain’s academy for its samurai which we discussed in our episode about Kotodai Park. This 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, but it was informed by some of the very critiques that Hayashi had originally raised. By the late 1850s, in the Ansei era, even the Shogunate had come around, authorizing the re-publication of Kaikoku Heidan for a modern audience that was far more interested in military reform and coast defense, in the face of American and British imposed unequal treaties and military interventions.
If, today, you visit Kawauchi, there’s a memorial you should check out. Go to the treeline behind the Sendai City Museum, which sits at the foot of Mount Aoba, right up against the Hirose River. You’ll find a bust of Date Masamune, patterned after part of his equestrian statue that stands at the top of the old castle walls. But, built into a slab of rock nearby, you’ll also find a bas-relief memorial of Hayashi Shihei himself. Adopted son of Sendai, advocate of opening to the rest of the world: in the end, he was vindicated.
Bas relief of Hayashi Shihei at Mount Aoba. Photo by the author.
And in short, Hayashi Shihei walked so people like Mamiya Rinzo and Otsuki Jukusai could run.
Last week, we looked at Mamiya Rinzō, his surveys of Ezochi– the land we now call Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands– and how they aided the Shogunate’s efforts to bolster its control of the march to the north of Honshu. We also learned how this was tied up in the Siebold Incident. Mentioned along the way was Mamiya’s teacher, Inō Tadataka– alias Inō Hanzaemon– and his own epic survey of the Japanese coastline. Unfinished at the time of Inō’s death, Mamiya finished it and saw it to publication. This week, we’re going to explore more of Inō’s story, and round out our appreciation of the man, his career, and his oeuvre. I should note here that last week I kept flubbing his name– it’s Inō, not Ina– this week, I’m getting that right.
Okay, so Inō Hanzaemon was born in Ozeki, a village of Kazusa Province, which today is part of Kujukuri town, in what’s now Chiba Prefecture. He was adopted by a wealthy family of sake brewers and rice dealers of Sawara in nearby Shimosa Province– today part of Katori, Chiba Prefecture– which is how he received the Inō surname. At that level of financial privilege, the distinction between a merchant and a warrior was a lot blurrier than might be assumed, which is important to bear in mind considering that he went on to work for the Shogunate and is often depicted with not one but two swords, which is a well known mark of the warrior caste in Edo period Japan. He was wealthy enough that he was able to use his own funds to provide relief for the local population, which was suffering the brunt of the Tenmei famine, and to have his own wealth not particularly adversely impacted. And, this financial privilege also afforded him the stability and freedom to engage in self-study of calendar making and astronomy.
A word on that point of astronomy. Some of you might remember one of the more popular earlier episodes of Friday Night History– long before it was a podcast– in which I talked about the imperial court’s Ministry of Divination– a sort of real-life Ministry of Magic which existed until 1873. While its purview did indeed center on matters surrounding the occult, it was also the bureau which handled things like calendar making, astronomy, weather forecasts, and more– all of these very real-world sciences were important to how it did its work. So the Shogunate, as with the imperial court, had its own astronomers and calendar makers, who were aware of the work of the Ministry, but had less of an emphasis on the occult. And so at age 49 in 1795 (Kansei 7) Inō went to study with one of them, Takahashi Yoshitoki. Again, it was Inō’s financial privilege that allowed this– he was not only wealthy, but by this point, he’d already retired as a successful businessman, passing on the family headship and business while retaining access to the family’s wealth with which to fund his own studies.
This is the part that I keep getting stuck on, as I research and write this story. The Tenmei Famine killed and impoverished a lot of people, and this was also the era of rice speculators hoarding rice from starving people and triggering the direct action called “smashings” (uchikowashi) where angry, starving people smashed their doors in and carried off the rice. So the thought that Inō had the money to independently do a survey of this magnitude, in a time when so many others were suffering, haunts me.
For better or worse, Inō spent five years furthering his political and scholarly connections in Edo as well as advancing his personal studies. At the end of it, the Shogunate approved his plan to survey the Japanese coastline, and Inō set off on the first of what was eventually a series of ten surveying missions. The Shogunate endorsed the mission, given– as we saw in last week’s episode– the rising threat posed by the Russian Empire’s incursions to the north. It wasn’t long before this, after all, that Russian envoy and military officer Adam Laxman visited Japan in an attempt to negotiate concessions including a trade agreement. But the Shogunate was also dealing with its own recovery from the Tenmei Famine, and I’m sure it was all too glad to let Inō do the survey as long as he picked up the cost himself. These surveys took him and his team around to all the extremes of Japan. Inō surveyed the Japanese coast, as well as much of the coastline of neighboring Ezochi, with surveying instruments of his own invention.
As an example of Inō’s work, let’s take a look at this snippet, which I’ve snapshotted from the maps in the collection of the US Library of Congress. For listeners, check out the blogpost for the image. For reference we’re orienting ourselves with West to the top in the interest of text direction.
To the top of the image is the spine of the Ōshū Mountains. Below them, along some smaller hills, rise castle walls– Sendai Castle, on Mount Aoba– with the legend “Residence Castle of Lord Matsudaira Masachiyo.” House Date had the right to use the Matsudaira surname, the original name of the Tokugawa clan, as an honorific– Masachiyo was the childhood name of Date Chikamune, the then-lord of Sendai domain.
Below, in a red zigzag, the line of the Ōshū Highway runs left (south) to right (north). Nagamachi at left, Nanakita at right, both part of the modern city of Sendai. The county line between Natori County and Miyagi County is clearly delineated– here, it follows the line of the Hirose River, on the left. Pretty much all of what we see here is part of modern Sendai, and this stretch of the Ōshū Highway roughly overlaps with the line of the Tohoku Shinkansen, the Tohoku bullet train.
Inō’s survey work was so gradual and monumental that along the way, others joined him and even became his students. One of these was Mamiya Rinzō, about whom we talked last week– to get his story, go back and listen to Episode 25: Mamiya Rinzō Goes North. Mamiya came from similar affluent non-warrior roots as Inō, and as we discovered, went north from what’s now Wakkanai with Matsuda Denjūrō in tow to map the coast of Sakhalin, which at the time was thought to be a peninsula connected to the Asian continent, but which thanks to Mamiya’s survey was proven to be an island.
In 1812 Mamiya returned to Ainu lands to finish the unfinished work of Inō, together with others of the latter’s friends and students. Inō died in 1818, at age 73, which was extremely long-lived for the time. But the work of Mamiya and others made possible the 1821 presentation to the Shogunate– and original publication– of Dai Nihon Enkai Yochi Zenzu, Inō’s coastal mapping survey. You can check out Inō’s Dai Nihon Enkai Yochi Zenzu here, digitized and viewable in the collection of the US Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/2001620020/ — for the podcast listeners, check out the blogpost and follow the link. It’s big. It’s also apparently one of the most complete surviving collections of the entire series anywhere in the world.
As noted last week, the work of both Mamiya and Inō was crucial to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s development of coast defense nationwide as well as policy on the northern border, in and beyond the march controlled by the house of Matsumae. As such, it was deeemed strategically sensitive information, which is why the Shogunate reacted so severely when in 1828, the Prussian doctor Philip Franz von Siebold, then posted to Dejima in Nagasaki harbor at the Dutch East India Company’s outpost, was found to be in possession of copies of Mamiya and Inō’s maps in what is remembered as the Siebold Incident (Shiiboruto Jiken シーボルト事件). The maps continued to inform Japanese cartography for nearly a century, well into the late Meiji era.
Inō’s former residence is preserved as a museum in what’s now Katori, Chiba Prefecture, where across the street can be found the Inō Tadataka Memorial Museum, which preserves documents as well as some of the surveying equipment from this monumental undertaking. If you’re in the area, or are listening one day when it’s possible to enter Japan again, go and take a look!
Source
John Z. Bowers. Western Medical Pioneers in Feudal Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 121-122.
Gen Itasaka. Nihon o Tsukutta Hyakujin: 100 Japanese You Should Know (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1998), pp. 138-139.
Folks, Season 1 of Friday Night History is coming to a close soon– though the series itself has been running for exactly 2 years as of my writing these words. The stats on Anchor.com for the podcast tell me that it’s had just shy of 1000 listens in total, and hey, that’s not bad for a new podcast that only really got launched this January!
I’ve been a freelance author, artist, and historian for 4 years now, and when I think of how many different platforms I have a presence on these days, it’s a little wild to think back to being a brand new, bewildered former academic unsure of how to make this whole business-on-the-internet thing work. I podcast, I stream on Twitch, I have ebooks and audiobooks on itch.io and Gumroad, I’ve been commissioned for translation and research work and have published articles, short stories, and even my first novel!
That’s all thanks to readers and listeners and viewers like you. My goal is to make this my fulltime job, and you’ve helped me make serious progress in that direction.
Hyōjōgawara in Sendai (1919) by Kawase Hasui
I have plans for further endeavors in the near future. My publisher is pushing me to put forth my novel Grey Dawn for awards, first of all. Second, I will be hosting the first of what will– given sufficient interest– be many digital workshops. My first history book — built out of my dissertation but expanded and revised with a general audience in mind– needs editing, and further resources. I want to take out adspace to bring bigger audiences to the podcast, the Twitch streams, and this blog. All of that comes at a cost– but we can make them happen, with your support.
All of this– as with your support thus far– can make it possible to grow not only the podcast but the rest of my publishing, streaming, writing, and other endeavors.
You are the best damn people a girl could hope to work for, friends. Thank you. You are the wind beneath my wings.
Today, Japanese maps (and world maps) take for granted that Hokkaido and Sakhalin are islands. This is not surprising. But there was a time when a common understanding of geography in Japan had it that the islands we now call Hokkaido and Sakhalin were connected to the Asian mainland. This week, we’re going to talk about the survey that changed that understanding with regard to Sakhalin, how it can challenge our assumptions about the Edo period, and how it laid the groundwork for Japan’s current borders.
First and foremost, we need to bear in mind that in the late 18th century, the Shogunate knew about, and was concerned about, the growth of Russian imperial influence to the north. There was an earlier strategic concern in the 17th century of potential Manchu invasion from the north, but by the 18th, the threat had shifted to the Russians, whose ships often appeared there during survey missions and amidst colonial expansion. While the Shogunate’s policy of national seclusion remained in effect, even diehard supporters understood that something needed to be done in order to ensure the security of the northern border.
Mind you, there was Japanese settlement and even a feudal domain across the Tsugaru strait in what we now call Hokkaido, but this was not part of Japan proper at the time.
Let me say that again.
Hokkaido was not part of Japan proper at the time, and modern Japan– the modern imperial state that wasn’t the patchwork of semi-independent feudatories anymore– didn’t exist yet. Hokkaido wasn’t annexed until 1869.
Okay, I hear you ask, so what was it until then?
Let me introduce you to the concept of a march. A march is a borderland. It’s a concept that’s well established in European history and beyond. In the Edo period, the Matsumae controlled territory of what we now call southern Hokkaido was not part of Japan proper but was a march. Elsewhere in Ezochi, the Shogunate asserted direct control, and had the domains of northern Honshu, most notably Sendai, Aizu, Akita, and Morioka domains, administer territory on its behalf as their people and resources had less of a distance to travel.
In other words, to the Shogunate, the lands where Japanese people lived and where house Matsumae ruled, was a march. And be that as it may, it was still deemed to be at potential danger from Russian incursion. And while the land around the Matsumae territory was pretty well known, points further north were less clearly and reliably surveyed, and the Shogunate wanted to assert better control over those territories. This was especially the case starting in the early 19th century, when encounters with Russian vessels became a little more common, and the house Matsumae proved itself to be less trustworthy than the Shogunate would have desired. So I should take a moment here to do due diligence and say, let’s be real, while national defense was part of the equation here, empire building and colonization was also a motivation. We’ll come back to that in a little more detail later.
One of the most important things for planning an effective defense is knowing the terrain. While there were increasingly accurate maps of the main islands (Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu) and the smaller islands around them, maps of Ezochi– Hokkaido and Sakhalin and the Kuriles– were less accurate. Inō Hanzaemon’s work in mapping the Japanese coastline helped significantly improve that, but his work– unfinished at the time of his death– was completed by Mamiya Rinzō, one of his students, whose work is going to be our focus today.
Mamiya Rinzō (1780-1844) was born into a peasant family in Tsukuba county of Hitachi Province (modern day Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture), but was elevated to warrior caste by adoption, owing in part to his distinction as a student of mathematics and surveying. He was assigned to the Shogunate administrative offices in Hokkaido in 1800, where he became a student of Inō Hanzaemon. Mamiya surveyed Etuworopsir (better known by its Japanese name of Etorofu-tō) in 1806, but in 1808, departed from what’s now the city of Wakkanai with his assistant Matsuda Denjūrō to survey Sakhalin, to the north. They split up at the southernmost point, with Mamiya going up the eastern coast and Matsuda going up the western coast, meeting at the northernmost tip. Though Mamiya had a decent amount of skill in the Ainu language, the further north he traveled, the less people he found who spoke the Ainu he would’ve known– i.e., the Ainu of what’s now Hokkaido– much less any Ainu at all. This is unsurprising, as he would’ve also been encountering Nivkh and Orok people, that far north. At the point they met, and confirmed that Sakhalin was an island, Mamiya and Matsuda erected a marker that read Dai Nihon koku Kokkyo National Boundary of Great Japan.
Yes, this didn’t go unchallenged– Imperial Russia eventually colonized Sakhalin too. Yes, in practical terms, there wasn’t much the Shogunate could do to enforce that kind of mindblowingly bold claim to all of Sakhalin. But again, let’s be clear. This wasn’t exploration for the sake of exploration, and it wasn’t simply a matter of defense. Mamiya worked for the Shogunate, and he was contributing to its expansion of power to the north.
After setting up that marker, Mamiya crossed the strait aboard an Ainu vessel, and went to the mouth of the Amur River, entering its estuary and further confirming that Sakhalin was an island and not part of the continent itself. In 1812 he returned to Ainu lands to finish the unfinished work of Inō, making possible the 1821 publication of Dai Nihon Enkai Yochi Zenzu, Inō’s survey. You can check out Inō’s Dai Nihon Enkai Yochi Zenzu here, digitized and viewable in the collection of the US Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/2001620020/ — for the podcast listeners, check out the blogpost and follow the link. It’s big.
Shogunate policy in Hokkaido and points north benefited from both Mamiya and Inō’s work, but oddly enough, Mamiya’s work also became involved in an international incident in fairly short order. Philip Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) is a man who honestly deserves an episode of his own, and I’ll probably do that down the road. But for now, let’s give the brief summary: he was Prussian, in Japan with the Dutch trading mission at Dejima in Nagasaki, where he served as physician and taught Shogunate retainers about Western medicine while conducting observations and some of the first European cataloguings of Japanese flora and fauna. But thanks to his professional contacts with Japanese scholars he also obtained Japanese maps of the northern frontier, including the then-recent work of Mamiya and Inō. von Siebold had planned to smuggle these maps out of the country when he left in the autumn of 1828, but the ship that was to carry him was wrecked in a storm immediately on leaving harbor. von Siebold and the other survivors returned to Dejima, the Dutch enclave and trading post in Nagasaki, and their ship’s cargo was salvaged and inspected by Shogunate authorities, which is when the authorities discovered the map. If von Siebold thought he was homebound at the time, he was sorely mistaken, as the Shogunate confined him to Dejima for the ensuing year while its court case wound its way through. By the end, von Siebold was deported from Japan for having nearly compromised national security, though he was allowed to take his collection of local flora, fauna, and books along with him, first to his residence in Jakarta (which was then called Batavia), and thence to Holland.
Philip Franz von Siebold in older years (image PD)
The Shogunate ordered Mamiya to take part in a number of other projects focused on national security, though closer to home, in the form of coast defense for the waters around Edo. You might recall some of the earlier episodes where we talked about the intentional American missions and accidental British incursions into the waters at the mouth of Edo Bay, in the 19th century– this is some of what concerned the Shogunate at the time. Mamiya died in 1844, 9 years before the Perry mission and the subsequent dramatic shift in Shogunate priorities regarding foreign policy, coastal defense, and national security. Like his mentor, Mamiya is commemorated with a bronze statue, though Mamiya’s is in Wakkanai, where he departed together with Matsuda Denjuro, on his famous trip that confirmed Sakhalin was an island.
The border between Japan and Russia has often changed since Mamiya’s time, as have the governments of both countries. Hokkaido was, as noted above, annexed in 1869, and has remained Japanese territory ever since. For about 40 years, from the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 to the Soviet invasion just prior to the end of the Second World War in 1945, Sakhalin from the 50th parallel on south was controlled by the Japanese Empire, which also controlled the Kuril Islands. Today, there is a lingering dispute over the Southern Kurils, but Russia administers all of that territory.
And yet, one of the common names for the strait separating Sakhalin from the Asian continent and the Amur River estuary– sometimes called the Strait of Tartary– is still Mamiya-kaikyo. The Mamiya Strait.
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