Fukuromachi

A typical walking tour of Hikone takes you from the station to the castle, then along Castle Road with its recently rebuilt Edo-style shops, through the mock-Taishō period Yonbanchō Square, to Ginzachō with its genuine Shōwa period arcade. At the end of the arcade, you enter Hanashōbu Street with its unmistakably old buildings, and if you take one of the alleys off to the right towards the Seri River, you’ll find yourself in Fukuromachi.

Fukuromachi is the old ‘licensed quarter’ of the castle town, where prostitutes and entertainers were allowed by the feudal government to ply their trade. These quarters were a feature of every castle town in Japan, allowing the otherwise rigidly controlled samurai to let off steam and relax a bit.

I visited Fukuromachi to talk to the proprietors of a couple of very different venues in the quarter. First I met Matsubara Tomiko who runs a selection of establishments in Fukuromachi including Club Hama, a hostess bar for members, Snack Kuro, a public bar, and the Sushimatsu restaurant. Out of hours, she was in her casual attire, but later in the evening, she would have been fully encased in smart kimono. We took one of the box seats in the huge sitting room of her club, among potted orchids that she received for her last birthday. There’s a piano and drum kit, and a projector. The furnishings and décor are of the highest quality and good taste.

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“‘Fukuromachi’ – ‘Bag town’, is a rather weird name. What’s its origin?”
“‘Fukuromachi isn’t its official name. It’s the old name of the area. This area is like a maze of cul-de-sacs, so it’s like a bag. In the old days, it was a licensed prostitution quarter. In modern times, the official name ‘Fukuromachi’ was abolished. When children went to school, it was considered insensitive if they were known as ‘kids from Fukuromachi’. But I think it’s a shame that the old name was phased out. When I was a child, this was still a red-light district. But the government decided to shut down all the brothels.”
“What sort of customers visit your establishment?”
“The first floor is a club, and our members are mostly the owners of companies in Hikone and hereabouts. The second floor is a bar that’s open to everyone. On the first floor we have a dress code, but in the second-floor bar, anything goes – work clothes, shorts and so on.”

At this point I was imagining a sort of linoleum and Formica setup, but when Matsubara-san took me upstairs to the second-floor establishment I was surprised to find a space whose elegance rivals the club below. Its décor features a bamboo theme, and there are beautiful carved transoms taken from the traditional building that used to stand on this site. In the upstairs bar you can enjoy beer, sake, wine and cocktails with various snack foods like fried chicken and chips, cheese, and sliced tomato. You can also order sushi from the nearby Sushimatsu restaurant.

“Do you serve local sake here?”
“Yes, we have a wide selection. Although our club members tend to drink wine, whiskey, and brandy, I really like sake. Customers at Sushimatsu tend to drink nihonshu.”
“Do you have a particular favourite brand of sake?”
“There are so many good local brands to choose from, so I like drinking a variety of types. At the moment, I’m enjoying the freshly pressed nigorizake of springtime. It’s slightly cloudy. It’s quite strong, but it’s delicious.”
“I haven’t had any nigorizake from Shiga yet.”
“Oh dear! We’ll have to fix that! Nigorizake isn’t one of your fancy modern types. It’s made using the simple old methods. You can enjoy sake as it used to taste in the old days.”
“Do you also serve warm sake.”
“Oh yes! I love it in winter.”

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The conversation turned to the old days when everyone drank sake.
“I used to enjoy exchanging glasses with my guests. That’s how we used to drink socially in the days before everyone became bothered by ‘hygiene’.”
Matsubara-san showed me a selection of the beautifully decorated ceramic bowls used for washing glasses between exchanges. She demonstrated how the glass is pressed against the bottom of the bowl and pulled up sharply, drawing water rapidly up into the glass.

According to Matsubara-san, there were two hundred geiko in the area, and four hundred prostitutes. So it was a very lively place.
“When I was a child, men would come into the area and they’d pick a girl they fancied, then they’d go and watch a film, or see the fireflies in summer, or play scoop-the-goldfish. Often, they’d invite me to join them. Then they’d have dinner together. It was actually very sociable.

Fukuromachi never slept. It was always as bright as day, but once you stepped out of the quarter it was pitch black at night and you needed a torch. Then about thirty-eight years ago, the Ginza shopping street was built, and people came from all over Japan in buses to see it. After that, Fukuromachi has been in decline, but the Fukuromachi Proprietors Association is working to restore the area’s popularity.”

One of these efforts includes the installation of lanterns featuring a beguiling and conspiratorial-looking lady in a kimono, on premises owned by Association members. The lanterns proclaim that the area is ‘safe’, which is another way of saying that there are no longer prostitutes here. The lady on the lantern is Murayama Taka, also known as Takajo. Born in nearby Taga, she became a geisha in Kyōto. She was the lover of Ii Naosuke, and she’s said to have taught the shamisen in Fukuromachi.

The quarter is a fascinating mix of architectural styles and frontages, many of which have been redone numerous times. Elegant geisha houses with red latticework fronts stand next to hole-in-the-wall snack bars. Later in the evening when things in the quarter were getting into stride, I met bar owner Toda Moritake, alias Kenny, who owns Tavern Takazono, an American-style bar. The side of his building has a big mural of Louis Armstrong blowing his horn, but the entrance is very small, and perhaps a little intimidating to first-time visitors. Toda-san, who wears distinctively American clothing and who has some of the atmosphere of Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, is concerned about how to make the area more accessible to foreign visitors. The traditional seating charge of these unique Japanese entertainment districts isn’t something that can be easily done away with, but the challenge is how to make it acceptable to foreign guests.

“Kenny” explains that the cover charge includes a small dish of food, the right to sit at your stool without interruption all night, and a certain amount of entertainment, whether a pleasant chat with the owner or a hostess, or live music and impromptu dancing. The people who frequent Fukuromachi aren’t shy, retiring types. When someone plonks themselves down next to you, you can expect to be drawn into their circle with minimal formalities. Conversation flows, somehow or other. Kenny himself is talented at several instruments, and after a few cocktails or pints of Guinness, somehow it seems easy to get up and dance when he starts drumming to something evocative from the 1980s. He knows the classics of America, Europe, and Japan, going back forty years or more.

Besides the bars, there are restaurants offering Japanese and foreign cuisine, so you can dine most enjoyably in Fukuromachi before the night heats up. Whichever bag you end up in, a visit to toujours gai Fukuromachi is sure to become a cherished memory.

Ii Naosuke

Ii Naosuke was the feudal lord of Hikone and also chief minister to the Tokugawa shogunate. His rise to national power was unexpected, and he was assassinated for his efforts to steer the nation through its difficult entry to modernity.

Naosuke was born in 1815, the 14th son of Ii Naonaka, feudal lord of Hikone. As the 14th son, Naosuke was not in line for succession, and he spent his early years living within the grounds of Hikone castle. He lived frugally and anticipating a life of scholarship and the martial arts, he immersed himself in Zen, the tea ceremony, and Japanese classical literature. He also played the shamisen.

During this time, he founded a school of the tea ceremony, and after he became the lord of the Hikone Domain, he continued to write on the subject. Naosuke’s tea ceremony emphasizes the spirit of the individuals who take part in the tea ceremony, and the importance of experiencing the “thusness” of a unique moment. No matter how many times you have tea with the same people, if you recognise that today’s ceremony is an encounter that will never be repeated, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

The turning point came for Naosuke at the age of 32. By a strange coincidence of adoptions and deaths, Naosuke was suddenly in line for succession as leader of the Ii clan. He became lord of the Hikone Domain in 1850.

In 1853, the American Commodore Perry arrived and the Shogunate was rocked by the issue of how to conduct diplomacy with aggressive external powers. At the same time, radical samurai in certain domains began calling for the overthrow of the Shōgunate and restoration of the Emperor to supreme power. Matters were further complicated by the question of who among several undesirable candidates would become the next Shōgun.

The Hikone lords had always served as advisors to the Shōgun. In 1858, Naosuke was named chief minister. He had responsibility for negotiating with the Americans a treaty that would avert the worst of their imperial ambitions without Japan suffering complete collapse as China had recently. Any agreement was unlikely to satisfy any party. With the realistic fear that unless he did so, the whole of Japan would come under attack, Naosuke signed an unequal Treaty of Amity and Commerce not only with America but with other European countries. The radicals condemned this as a surrender of national sovereignty. As part of the agreement, the fishing of village of Yokohama was opened to foreign ships.

In his struggle to have a young and easily influenced Shōgun appointed next, Naosuke undertook a purge of his opponents among the higher-ranking lords. Several were executed and others were forcibly retired. While this cowed their peers, it only inflamed the anger of lower-ranking samurai, and on March 3, 1860 Naosuke was attacked and killed by samurai from the radical imperial faction, seventeen from Mito and one from Satsuma, outside the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle.

The Shōgunate was taken by surprise by his murder, and his death wasn’t announced until several months later, after they had faked an illness and his resignation. Naosuke was buried in the temple of Gōtoku-ji, in Setagaya, Tokyo.

The imperial faction ultimately prevailed in 1868 and imperial rule was restored, ending the Edo period and marking the start of the Meiji period. Thanks to Naosuke’s attempts to preserve the then legitimate government of Japan, the Ii clan fell into disgrace, at least outside his home region, and the huge city of Yokohama. More recently, his efforts to safeguard an unprepared Japan from more militarily advanced powers have come to be recognised. Realistic statues of Naosuke can be seen in and around Hikone Castle where he spent his youth, and in a park in Yokohama.

Takajo

When you visit Fukuromachi, the fascinating old licensed quarters of Hikone, you’re sure to encounter a beguiling and conspiratorial-looking lady in a kimono looking down on you from a lantern affixed to an eating and drinking establishment. This is Takajo, or Murayama Taka, also known as Murayama Kazue.

She was born in 1809, in a Buddhist temple at Taga Shrine. Immediately after birth, she was entrusted to a samurai named Murayama who was serving the temple, and at 18, she became a maid of the lord of Hikone at that time, Ii Naoaki.

At the age of 20, she went to Kyōto and became a geisha in Gion, where she learned to play the shamisen. At that time, she gave birth to a boy, but because it was an illegitimate child, she returned to Hikone near her hometown. Here she met Ii Naosuke, a devotee of the shamisen, who lived in modest quarters within Hikone Castle, and apparently became his lover. A few years later, she also had a close relationship with Nagano Shuzen, Naosuke’s tutor and counsellor. Takajo taught shamisen to the geisha of Fukuromachi. The two parted ways when Naosuke went to Edo.

Ii Naosuke became chief counsellor to the Shogun, and in an attempt to quell the faction that sort to replace the shogunate with imperial rule, Naosuke carried out the Ansei Purge, executing a number of his peers. Takajo became a spy, sending information about the rebel forces in Kyōto to Edo. She’s known as the first female agent of the Japanese government to ever be named.

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After Naosuke was assassinated in 1860 outside the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle, she was captured in 1862 by samurai of the imperial restoration faction. Although her life was spared as a woman, she was tied to a stake in public for three days and three nights in Kyōto. However, her son Tada Tatewaki was killed by feudal retainers of the rebellious Tosa and Chōshū Domains in place of his mother.

After that, she became a nun at Konpuku-ji Temple and died in 1876 Her grave is located at Enkō-ji, the main temple of Konpuku-ji, and there’s a memorial at Konpuku-ji.

For a long time, the specific relationship between Taka and Ii Naosuke was unknown, but at the end of 2011, a letter from Naosuke to Taka was found at the Ii Art Museum in Kyōto. The letter is thought to have been written by Naosuke in his late twenties, and it expresses his painful feelings when he was unable to see her due to the opposition of his family.

Ii Naomasa

Originally from today’s Shizuoka Prefecture, Ii Naomasa was rewarded for his service to Tokugawa Ieyasu with the Sawayama Domain, which belonged to Ishida Mitsunari before the Battle of Sekigahara. Naomasa destroyed all trace of Mitsunari and established a new castle city and domain named Hikone.

Ii Naomasa was born in Tōtōmi Province in 1561. His childhood name was Toramatsu and later Manchiyo. His family, like the Tokugawa, had originally been retainers of the Imagawa clan. But following the death of the clan’s leader in the Battle of Okehazama in 1560, Naomasa’s father was convicted of treason by the new leader and was subsequently killed. Naomasa, then a very small child, was taken into the protection of his relative, Ii Naotora, who was unusual in becoming female daimyō of the Ii clan. When Naotora began working with Tokugawa Ieyasu, she sent the teenage Naomasa to be his page. Naomasa, who was small but very handsome, is reported to have become Ieyasu’s catamite.

Naomasa made his mark at the Battle of Nagakute in 1584 successfully commanding around three thousand musketeers. In the battle, Naomasa fought so valiantly that he won praise from Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was on the opposing side. The battle resulted in an alliance between the Tokugawa and the Toyotomi, and to cement it, Hideyoshi’s mother was sent to stay with Naomasa as a hostage. Hideyoshi’s mother was apparently charmed by her jailer’s good looks and hospitality.

Naomasa’s rise continued through the turbulent Warring States period thanks to his savage courage on the battlefield. He adopted a uniform of blood-red armour for his troops who became known as the Red Devils, not only for their appearance but also for their discipline and aggression, inspired by fear of their leader. Naomasa’s own armour was notable for the huge golden horns protruding from the helmet.

The Ii clan flag shows a squared off version of the first character of the name in gold on a blood red ground. This mark can be seen widely around Hikone. It symbolises the well at Ryōtan-ji Temple in Hamamatsu associated with the origins of the Ii clan. The family crest is a stylised tachibana orange flower symbolising immortality.

By the time of the Battle of Sekigahara, Naomasa had established himself as one of the Four Guardians of the Tokugawa, and he had married the adopted daughter of Ieyasu. When the clash finally came between Ieyasu and Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigara, Naomasa’s force was the first of the Eastern Army to engage with the Mitsunari’s Western Army. However, towards the end of the battle when Mitsunari’s defeat was apparent, Naomasa was wounded by a stray bullet as he sought to prevent Shimazu Yoshihiro’s escape from the battlefield.

The wound was Naomasa’s undoing. Although he was awarded Mitsunari’s large Sawayama Domain, he was unable to participate in the mop-up of Mitsunari’s allies and he died in 1602, aged forty-one, before the completion of his project to establish the new castle town of Hikone. He was succeeded by his son Naotsugu who built most of the castle.

The Ii family remained highly influential throughout the Edo period as loyal retainers and advisers to the Tokugawa. The sixteenth scion of the Hikone Ii family, Naoyoshi, was mayor of Hikone from 1953 to 1989. Hikonyan, the mascot of Hikone, inherited Naomasa’s huge golden horns. Naomasa’s grave is at Ryōtan-ji Temple in Hikone at the foot of Sawayama. His mounted statue stands in front of Hikone Station, and his armour can be seen in Hikone Castle Museum, along with many other exhibits relating to the Ii clan.