How to Dance Past the Enemy, Aizu style!

The lion dance, like the Chinese dragon dance, is an aspect of Asian culture well known around the world. But lion dances also take place in Japan, and it's one of these lion dances, the higanjishi of Aizu, which is at the core of the story here.

The scene is Aizu-Wakamatsu, fall 1868. The imperial armies have surrounded the castle town on all sides and are bombarding it heavily. Defeat seems close at hand, and yet there are Aizu forces beyond the siege who are returning but can't figure out how to break through.

Enter Yamakawa Okura (1845-1898, pictured at left in later years). Yamakawa, the brother of the curry-eating physicist in my last post, was an Aizu clan elder-- so, say, a cabinet member if the lord is the head of state. His large, well-provisioned force was outside the castle town at Tennei Village, also trying to figure out how to get in. He couldn't really fight his way through without taking tremendous losses, and there was no way he was going to retreat. So Yamakawa got together some of the villagers and, shall we say, put on a show:



He assembled the villagers into the dance and music troupe they'd have in springtime anyway, which is when these dances are done, and had them march in front of his army. And then he just walked into Aizu-Wakamatsu. Through the siege, right past the stunned Imperial Army soldiers. They had to have been confused. Per my sources, there was no camouflage involved, there was no sneaking. Yamakawa just did what, under the circumstances, would be the most ridiculous and unexpected course of action. As the old Armenian song goes, "When there is no way out or solution/Madmen find the answer..."

For the record? The force under Yamakawa's command got all the way into the castle unscathed. Unscathed!
 
Works Cited

• Aizu Higan Shishi, from Aizuwakamatsu City's Youtube page (accessed 2 May 2013)
• Noguchi Shin'ichi. Bakumatsu no Aizuhan. Tokyo: Gendai shokan, 2005.
• Yamakawa Kenjiro. Aizu Boshin Senshi. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1933.

Yamakawa Kenjiro and Japanese Curry Rice

Curry rice is probably one of the most popular items of modern Japanese cuisine. But it is hardly indigenous to Japan, and it has a history barely a 150 years long. So how did this get started? Who was the first Japanese person to eat something that's become such a staple?

That person would be Yamakawa Kenjiro (1854-1931, at left): physicist, teacher, and (in my opinion) all-around awesome guy. Born in Aizu to a high-ranking samurai family, he survived the Boshin War, where he saw the action firsthand, including the grisly death of at least one member of his family. This affected him deeply, and for the rest of his life he was active in the "Aizu diaspora," and also as an advisor to the domain's ex-daimyo family. It also spurred him to gather interviews and documents, so while he's known as a physicist, he is also an historian who wrote several major works, including the lengthy Aizu Boshin Senshi [A History of Aizu in the Boshin War].

His claim to fame is physics. He was the first Japanese person to earn a Ph.D. in the field, and also one of the first to attend Yale University, at the Sheffield School. He went on to become president of Tokyo University and Kyoto University, as well as one of the founders of Kyushu University. Those of you who know your Nobel laureates-- Yukawa Hideki, first Japanese Nobel laureate, was one of his students. Yamakawa was later ennobled, and served in the Privy Council. He died in 1931.

At any rate, how's the curry fit in? He was the first Japanese person to eat it, or so the story goes, during his time at Yale. The Japanese style curry rice we know today is a variant of the Royal Navy's curry rice, but that was still a few years in the future during Yamakawa's Connecticut days. Little did he know he was the first to partake in what would become so established, by our time!

Here is a recipe for Japanese-style curry rice. Enjoy, and think of that young student in Yale. How many of us, I wonder, are unknowing trendsetters?

Works Cited

• Beef Curry on Wikimedia Commons (accessed 2 May 2013)
• Curry recipe on Food.com (accessed 2 May 2013)
• Nakamura  Akihiko. Byakkotai. Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 2001.
• Yamakawa Kenjiro. Aizu Boshin Senshi. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1933.

The Amazing Legs of Niizuma Kanbe'e

Before the post, a bit of a foreword. As of this post, I am expanding the breadth of my topic-- while my tendency will be toward Tohoku, which is what I know and where I've lived, I am officially broadening this blog's coverage to include issues concerning rural Japanese history and culture, and aspects of the traditional arts, I will no longer limit myself to the northeast. I look forward to bringing you all more stories from more parts of Japan, soon. Anyway, on to the show!

We've all heard, I'm sure, about the marathon: 26 miles of run, run, run, in commemoration of the Greek messenger Phedippides. In this post I'd like to share the story of Niizuma Kanbe'e, a Sendai retainer who loved a good story, so much so that he ran nineteen ri (46 miles) in four hours from his post in Iwagasaki to meet with friends in Sendai for evening chats.

But how did he manage this incredible feat? How did he make it across that distance that fast, not drop dead after he'd arrived in Sendai, and then be able to turn around and go all the way back? Read on!

Biographical Spotlight: Ogata Koan

A step outside of Tohoku and on down to Osaka for this post. Our topic is Ogata Koan (1810-1863), a medical doctor of the late Edo period. This post is written with those of my readers in mind who practice traditional Chinese medicine, who would benefit from some observations on the life of a doctor in a "traditional" East Asian setting.

Ogata was a pioneering doctor in his time, adapting Western medical practices-- for example, in vaccination-- for use in Japan. But this was not all he did. His greatest and most enduring impact has been in the realm of education. He founded a school in Osaka, called Tekijuku, in 1838. The curriculum at Tekijuku covered far more than just medicine: foreign language (Dutch), military science, and engineering were also studied there. And Ogata's students came from all around Japan. Though he may not be remembered by name, his students are people who are household names in Japanese history: Fukuzawa Yukichi (founder of Keio University), Otori Keisuke (military officer and diplomat), Omura Masujiro (general, whose statue stands at Yasukuni Shrine), Takamatsu Ryoun (early Meiji era doctor), and many others.

(above: Tekijuku as it stands in Osaka today)

 Those of you who know manga, you're in for a bit of a surprise! You may have heard of Tezuka Osamu, the artist behind "Astroboy." His ancestor, Tezuka Ryoan, was also one of Ogata's students. Fukuzawa Yukichi's autobiography mentions him; there is an amusing anecdote of the two of them playing pranks on the people in houseboats on one of Osaka's rivers. Tezuka made a manga about his ancestor's life, titled Hidamari no Ki.

So, to sum up: what is there to be learned from Ogata's life? A doctor is more than a "body mechanic," a doctor is also an educator. Also, as one of my professors once said, "there's no such thing as wasted research." The breadth of Ogata's learning fed into his work as a physician and a teacher, and formed an important part of the education that empowered his students who went on to change Japan.

Works Cited and Further Reading

• Fukuzawa Yukichi. Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. Translated by Eiichi Kiyooka. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
• McClain, James L, ed. Osaka: The Merchants' Capital of Early Modern Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
• Nakata Masahiro. Ogata Koan: Bakumatsu no I to Oshie. Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2009.
• Tekijuku picture at Wikimedia Commons (accessed 25 Mar. 2013)
• Tezuka Osamu. Hidamari no Ki. (multiple vols.) Tokyo: Kodansha, 1994.
• Yoneda Kaisuke. Koan no Kusuribako. Suita: Osaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2001.

Spotlight on Cuisine: Yes, Ramen

So I'm guessing, dear reader, that you've heard of ramen before. Most often, outside of Japan, you'll see it prepackaged in styrofoam cups or little bricks, with the packet of suspicious-looking powder that's supposed to be soup stock. While this is convenient and cheap, those who have had the good fortune of eating more authentic (and fresher) forms of ramen know that it is a far cry from the good stuff.

But there are a lot of varieties of ramen, and northeastern Japan has a few of its own! At left is a photo of one, the famous Kitakata ramen. For more on Tohoku variants of this staple food, read on!

Suggestions? Let me know!

I think this is a good time to make a 'suggestions' post. What would you like to see here? What topics might be interesting to explore? Some things I plan to post on in coming weeks include:

• Toys/handcrafts (such as the okiagari-koboshi from Aizu, at left)
• Famous natural phenomena (e.g., the Ishibe cherry tree outside of Aizu, or the 400 year old Korean plums in Matsushima)
• More posts on women in Tohoku history (e.g. Shibue Io, Oyama Sutematsu, and Uryu Iwa)
• More folktales.

I eagerly await your comments!

Handcrafts: Akabeko, Aizu's red cows

A post on handcrafts this time. One of the folk handcrafts to come out of the Aizu region (Fukushima prefecture) is the akabeko, pictured at left. "Beko," in the local dialect, means "ox," and that's just what this is: a little red toy ox with a bobbing head. But what is the origin of this simple toy? What place does it have in its original region today?

For more on the red ox of Aizu, read on!

Biographical Spotlight: Kudo Heisuke

There remains a popular view in Japanese history that (a) Japan was hermetically sealed during the Edo period (1603-1868) and (b) that Commodore Perry's arrival in 1853 took Japan completely by surprise, as if there were no other foreigners appearing in Japanese waters outside the approved foreign settlements at Nagasaki.

Both of these views have, by now, been soundly disproved. There are a number of scholars whose work shows that (a) Japan in the Edo period was not isolated but was highly selective in foreign contacts, and (b) that Japanese politicians and scholars were aware of foreign news and developments. These scholars include Reinier Hesselink, Donald Keene, and Martha Chaiklin, to name a few.

Today I would like to write about one such figure, Kudō Heisuke. The "take-away" with Kudo is that he was the first to voice concerns about the Russian imperial expansion southward from Siberia, and that he was a part of a group of scholars in that era who were informed on foreign affairs and were voicing calls for military reform and national defense.

More below the jump.

Hachiman!

"Shrines of the City. Seventy-eight in total, of which eight bear the name Hachiman..."

The philosopher Tanabe Marebumi, writing in the late 18th century, began his record of Sendai's shrines with these words. All around Japan, there are shrines to Hachiman who is famous as the kami of war. At left is a photo of a scroll depicting Hachiman in the guise of a Buddhist monk.

During the Edo period, there were three shrines that were given particularly special treatment within Sendai. Two of them were to Hachiman, one was to the deified Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the last shogunal dynasty.

I'd like to talk a little bit about each of them below. During the Edo period, while the other 24 districts then part of Sendai were under the jurisdiction of the city magistrate (machi-bugyo), these three shrines and their surrounding neighborhoods were under the special supervision of the Date administration's Temples-and-shrines office. (Mihara, Kyodoshi Sendai Mimibukuro, p. 124) Of the three, I have visited Osaki Hachiman and Tosho-gu in the fall of 2005.

Consider this a "miscellany" post.

Two Years On

Two years have now passed since the 2011 tsunami and earthquake disaster in northeastern Japan. While there has been progress in the recovery, there is still a long way to go. People evacuated from the region are still scattered around Japan. Communities are a shadow of what they'd once been. Forests are devastated. Houses demolished. Priceless treasures and cultural landmarks, the topic on which I'd initially started this blog, washed away or burned. The wounds will take a long while yet to heal.

Though I was far away, this disaster affected me, as well. The places I'd known for years, the places I never imagined would become household names, were suddenly on the lips of everyone around me-- and in a negative way. In my shock and deep sadness, progress on my master's thesis was delayed, but not derailed. I finished on time, and am carrying on with my research, and my studies. I will continue doing what I can here, to bring little facets of Tohoku history and culture, and broader Japanese history and culture, to the English speaking world on the internet.

Stay tuned, folks. And keep donating and supporting however possible...this isn't over.

Preliminary Review: NHK series "Yae no Sakura"

(at left, a picture of Neesima (Yamamoto) Yae, who stands at right) Hello everyone! I wanted to take this opportunity to pop in and offer a brief, preliminary review of the series Yae no Sakura. This is this year's (2013's) history-themed series on the NHK network. The subject is Yamamoto Yae, a warrior woman of the 19th century who later became an educator and a co-founder of Doshisha University.

First, the makers of this series get huge props from me for situating Yae's story in a global context. She's known among some for her use of the American-made Spencer carbine, and the series opens not with fighting in Japan, but instead, Pickett's Charge, at the Battle of Gettysburg. The idea here is that the weapons used in the American Civil War were some of the weapons that were used in the Boshin War, just a few years later.

Another thing I have to applaud is that not everyone speaks the same way. Yae was born in the northeast, and both the child and adult actresses who play her at different ages seem to have been coached in what sounds, to my ears, like at least a reasonable approximation of the Aizu dialect. Characters from Kyushu sound like they're from Kyushu, characters from Edo sound like they're from Edo, and so on.

Further, the detail research, for the "stuff" in this series, is also solid! Here I mean details like crests, gear, and so on, are all solid, at least to my eyes. It's a lot to keep track of, but they're doing great so far.

My only complaint? Their Commodore Perry didn't have an American accent, and the American naval officers in the Perry scene seemed to be wearing Imperial Japanese Navy caps. Ultimately that's "small potatoes" compared to an overall well-executed series. I recommend it heartily.

For those of you who can read Japanese, here is the series' homepage.