Yoshino Arrowroot - Chapter 1

The Rightful Prince

It is now some twenty years since I made a trip deep into the mountains of Yoshino in Yamato Province, in the early 1910s. Why did I want to go so far into those mountains – nowadays called the Yamato Alps – at a time when the area was a great deal harder to reach than it is today? Let me start by explaining how the trip came about.

Some of my readers will perhaps know this, but in that area, around the manors of Totsukawa, Kitayama and Kawakami, there are longstanding legends about a descendant of the Southern Court emperors still referred to by local people as “the Southern Court Prince” or “the Rightful Prince”. Historians specialising in the period accept that this Rightful Prince – Prince Kitayama, a great-great-grandson of the Emperor Go-Kameyama – existed, so he is certainly not just a myth. To give a very brief summary, according to the standard school history textbooks, an agreement was reached to reunify the two imperial lines in 1392, under Shogun Yoshimitsu. This marked the end of the so-called Yoshino Court, which therefore died out a little over fifty years after the Emperor Go-Daigo established it in 1336. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that subsequently, in the dead of night on 23rd September 1443, a certain Kusunoki Jirō Masahide – a retainer of Prince Manjuji, an imperial prince of the Southern Court line – suddenly attacked the Tsuchimikado Imperial Palace, stole the three sacred treasures, and barricaded himself in on Mount Hiei. The prince was then pursued and attacked, and ended up committing suicide. Of the three sacred treasures the sword and mirror were recovered, but the jewel remained in the hands of the Southern Court faction, and the Kusunoki and Ochi clans, among others, are said to have continued to serve the prince’s two children, and raised an army with the aim of restoring them to the throne. They fled from Ise to Kii, and from Kii to Yamato, and eventually escaped into the remote mountainous area behind Yoshino where the Northern Court could not reach them. They are said to have set up the elder prince as Emperor and the younger as Shogun, changed the era name to Tensei, and kept the sacred jewel for over sixty years in a gorge where the enemy could not easily find it. It was in December 1457 that the two princes were tricked by surviving retainers of the Akamatsu clan and defeated, whereupon the Daikakuji imperial line finally became completely extinct. So if we do the calculations up to that date, after the 57-year period from 1336 to 1392, it was then another 65 years up to 1457, so actually there were imperial princes in Yoshino maintaining the Southern Court in opposition to the court in Kyoto for as long as 122 years.

Continuing their distant ancestors’ laudable tradition of support for the Southern Court, the inhabitants of Yoshino who have inherited that tradition say that the Southern Court period should be counted up to the time of this Rightful Prince, and readily insist even today that it wasn’t just fifty-something years; it continued for over a hundred years. I myself have had a strong interest in the secret history of the Southern Court since I enjoyed reading the Taiheiki as a boy, and I had long planned to try writing a historical novel rooted in the evidence relating to the Rightful Prince.

According to a document containing the collected folk traditions of the Kawakami manor, at one point the surviving retainers and other adherents of the Southern Court, afraid of attacks from the Northern Court faction, moved from Shionoha, in the foothills of what is now called Mount Ōdaigahara, to a ravine called Sannoko Valley – a thinly-populated dead end deep in the mountains running towards Ōsugidani in Sakai in Ise Province. There they are said to have built a royal palace and hidden the sacred jewel in a cave. According to sources including the Annals of the Kōzu and the Annals of the Akamatsu, thirty surviving members of the Akamatsu clan, led by Majima Hikotarō, tricked their way into the Southern Court, and on December 2nd 1457, taking advantage of a heavy snowfall, they suddenly pounced. One group attacked the Rightful Prince’s palace at Ōkōchi, while another group advanced on the Shogun Prince’s palace at Kōnotani. The Rightful Prince himself fought off his attackers with a sword, but was eventually killed by the rebels. The rebels escaped with the prince’s severed head and the sacred jewel, but they were slowed down by the snow, and were overtaken by darkness at the Ōbagamine pass, so they buried the Prince’s head in the snow and spent the night on the mountain. The following morning the men of the Yoshino 18th district pursued and attacked them, and while the battle was raging, the prince’s buried head spurted out a fountain of blood from under the snow, so they quickly located it, dug it out, and fought off the raiders. There are some differences in the accounts of these events between different sources, but they are described in all of the following: the Account of the Imperial Sojourn in the Southern Mountains, the History of the Southern Court, the Tale of the Cloud of Cherry Blossoms, and the Annals of the Totsukawa. The Annals of the Kōzu and the Annals of the Akamatsu, in particular, are accounts that were written either by actual participants in these battles in their old age, or by their descendants, so they are highly credible. According to one of these accounts, the prince was eighteen when all this happened. After having been ruined during the Kakitsu uprising,  the Akamatsu clan was able to recover as a result of the reward they received for the heinous murder of the two Southern Court princes and the return of the sacred jewel to Kyoto.

Because of its inaccessibility, that whole area stretching from the mountains behind Yoshino across to Kumano has no shortage of old legends and long-established families of good pedigree. For instance, the manor house of the Hori family of Anō was once used as temporary accommodation for the Emperor Go-Daigo, and not only does part of the building still survive exactly as it was then, but the family’s descendants apparently still live there today. Then there is the family of Takehara Hachirō, who is mentioned in the section of the Taiheiki that describes the flight of the Prince of the Great Pagoda to Kumano. The prince stayed for some time with this family, and even had a child by the daughter of the family; this Takehara family’s descendants are also flourishing. There is an even older legend by which local people say that the inhabitants of the hamlet of Gokitsugu, deep in Mount Ōdaigahara, are descended from a demon, so they are careful to avoid intermarrying with them; the people of that hamlet show no desire to marry outside either. They claim to be descended from the demon Zenki who accompanied the ascetic En no Gyōja. The whole area being that kind of place, there are a large number of families descended from local samurai who served the princes of the Southern Court, known as “persons of pedigree.” Currently, in the area around Kashiwagi, they worship the “Southern Court Prince” on 5th February every year, while at Kongōji temple in Kōnotani, where the remains of the shogunal palace are, they carry out a solemn service in honour of the other prince. On that day, several dozen households of “persons of pedigree” are permitted to wear ceremonial costumes emblazoned with the sixteen-chrysanthemum crest, and are given precedence over the representative of the Prefectural Governor and the village heads.

The historical documents I discovered only served to increase my enthusiasm for my plan to write a historical novel. The Southern Court – Yoshino of the blossoms – the mysterious region deep in the mountains – the young Rightful Prince, just eighteen – Kusunoki Jirō Masahide – the sacred jewel hidden deep in a cave – the Prince’s severed head spurting blood from under the snow… Just listing them like this shows what unbeatable material this is for a novel. And the setting is gorgeous, with mountain torrents, precipices, palaces and hovels, cherries in the spring, and colourful leaves in the autumn; I could take these elements and bring them to life in my story. Furthermore, it is not some unfounded fantasy. There is a plethora of records and old documents as well as the official histories, so that an author could probably still produce something worth reading even if he did no more than simply collect the historical information and lay it out in a suitable order. But if on top of that he added just a few stylistic flourishes, with a suitable admixture of folklore and legend, and incidental details specific to the region, using the descendants of demons, the ascetics of Mount Ōmine, the Kumano pilgrimage, a lead female character beautiful enough to be fit for a prince – this could be a princess descended from the Prince of the Great Pagoda, or something –  this would make an even more interesting work. I thought it extraordinary that such excellent material had for some reason not yet attracted the attention of any historical novelists. There is apparently an unfinished piece by Bakin entitled “A Tale of Chivalry”, which I haven’t read, but I understand that it centres on a fictional woman called Lady Koma, eldest daughter of the Kusunoki family, so it seems not to have any connection to the legend of the Rightful Prince. It seems there are also one or two Tokugawa period works dealing with the Yoshino princes, but it is not clear how far these are based on historical fact. In other words, I have never come across any book, play or puppet play in general circulation dealing with this topic. I therefore thought I would like to tackle it before anyone else took it on.

As it happened, at this point I was lucky enough to have the chance to gather all sorts of information about the geography and customs of that deep mountain region through an unexpected connection – a young man called Tsumura, whom I knew from my time at Tokyo First Middle School. He was from Osaka, but he had relatives living at Kuzu in Yoshino, so I took the opportunity to ask them a number of questions through him.

There are two places called “Kuzu” on the Yoshino River. The one downstream uses the character “葛”, while the upstream one uses the characters “国栖”, and it is the second of these that is famous because of the Noh piece about the Emperor Tenmu – that ancient sovereign of Japan who compiled the Asuka Kiyomihara Code. As it happens, the kuzu arrowroot powder for which Yoshino is famous is not produced in either of the two Kuzus. I don’t know about the downstream Kuzu, but most of the villagers in the upstream Kuzu make their living from paper-making. They do this using a primitive method rarely seen these days, in which the paper is made by soaking mulberry fibres in water from the Yoshino River and then spreading the resultant paste out by hand to dry. In this village the odd surname “Konbu” seems to be extremely common, and this is also the name of Tsumura’s relatives. As a matter of fact they are paper-makers, and the family is the biggest producer in the village. From what Tsumura told me, this Konbu family is also very long-established, and probably has some blood connection with the retainers of the Southern Court. It was only when I visited their house that I learnt for the first time that “入の波” is read “Shionoha” and “三の公” is read “Sannoko”. According to what Mr. Konbu told me, it is about fifteen miles from Kuzu to Shionoha, across the precipitous Gosha Pass, and then from there to Sannoko, it is five miles to the mouth of the gorge, and around ten miles to the deepest point where the Rightful Prince lived all that time ago. Of course this was only what he had heard, because even people from the Kuzu area hardly ever go to those remote upriver areas. But the raftsmen who come down the river say that deep in the valley, in a hollow called Hachimandaira, there is a hamlet of charcoal burners with five or six houses, and if you go another three or four miles to the very end of the valley, at a place called Kakushidaira, there really is something there that is said to be the ruins of the prince’s palace, as well as the cave where the sacred jewel is said to have been enshrined. But from the entrance to the valley for about ten miles, there is nothing you could really call a path, but just a succession of terrifying precipices, so that the place is not at all easy to reach, even for people like the wandering monks of Mount Ōmine. Generally people from the Kashiwagi area go as far as Shionoha, where they bathe in the hot spring that bubbles up by the side of the river, and from there they turn round and return home. If you explore the depths of the Sannoko valley itself, there are numerous hot springs bubbling up within the mountain stream, and a number of impressive waterfalls, such as the Myōjin Falls. But apparently the only people who see that wonderful scenery are the local woodmen and charcoal burners.

The raftsmen’s stories added an additional layer of richness to the world of my proposed novel. The location was already highly attractive, and I now had the perfect additional resource of hot springs bubbling up in mountain streams. I had already done all the research I could from my distant location, but if I hadn’t had the invitation from Tsumura at that point, I would hardly have been likely to have travelled somewhere so deep in the mountains. Having collected together all this material, I could have filled in the gaps from my imagination without the need for any field research at the actual site. And that would also have been much easier, but at around the end of October or early November that year, Tsumura came to me and said “Why don’t you come and take a look? It’s a great opportunity.” Tsumura needed to visit his relatives in Kuzu for some reason, so we probably wouldn’t make it as far as Sannoko, but we could go hiking in the area around Kuzu, and get a general feel for the geography and the customs, which I would certainly find of some use. I didn’t need to restrict myself to the history of the Southern Court, but the place being what it was, I could also gather some unrelated material there, and I’d easily be able to lay the groundwork for two or three novels. In any case, the trip certainly wouldn’t be a waste of time, so why didn’t I go there, with professional purposes uppermost in my mind? The climate was perfect just at that time of year, and crying out for a trip. Yoshino is famous for its cherry blossoms, but it’s pretty good in the autumn too – so said Tsumura.

I am afraid my preamble has gone on a bit, but these were the circumstances that made me suddenly want to go there. The “professional purposes” mentioned by Tsumura played their part, of course, but to be honest my main reason for going was just for fun.