The Quest for the Lost Daimyo Stones (continued)

Trackback here

During the months of February and march, I was working with an archaeologist named Hiro Sugiyama (right: A picture of Akira, Sugiyama, and me next to a cut stone in Usami). Frequent readers of the blog will remember that I was super-excited about this opportunity for me to get paid to walk around in the woods and look for ancient things. Sugiyama and I spent a couple of days each week walking along the beach or in the mountains around Ito, and we found quite a few stones from the Edo period.

So here's the background. Tokugawa Ieyasu became the first Shogun of Japan in 1600. He did so by defeating all opposition to his rule. The Shogun was the political ruler of Japan, while the Emperor stood as the symbol of the nation from his capital in Kyoto. Tokugawa needed to secure his reign as Shogun, which meant that he needed to make the daimyo ("dime-yo"--feudal lords) feel important, but also keep them working hard (spending money) so that they didn't get the chance to rise against him. So he commissioned enormous building projects in Edo. Tokugawa needed stone for the castles and their walls, so he ordered the daimyo to prospect, cut, and send stones for building by ship to Edo (Tokyo).

Sugiyama-san told me that the consensus is that there were something like 25 or 30 daimyo working the area around Ito and Usami. We found evidence in the form of markings on the stones of at least 7 of them. When the work crews found a stone that they wanted to use on the mountain, they would first score it so that they could cut it into manageable pieces. They used hammer and chisel to perforate a dotted line around the circumference of the stone. It looks like this:

Once they were finished with these marks, they would usually hammer tight-fitting wooden planks into the slots, and then soak them with water. Over time, the wood swelled, and eventually split the stone. Each stone was marked with the sign of the daimyo who employed the workers who cut it. There are many different markings, one of which was the mark of a daimyo named Mori. His symbol was the fletched end of an arrow. You can see it faintly here. I mistakenly used the flash, so the symbol is a little hard to make out:

Stones with this symbol were all over the mountains we walked on. Mori-san was very busy in Usami and Ito. Once the stones were cut, they were taken down the mountain and loaded on boats to be taken by ship to Edo. For some reason, a great number of stones were never delivered, and remain on the mountainside. I assume that Sugiyama is researching why this is so. Here's a shot of me clearing vegetation from some of the stones that were left behind. We spent a lot of time uncovering and marking the locations ofthe stones on topographical maps of the region. Here's acouple shots of me clearing the vegetation from a group of several stones on the mountain. You can pretty clearly see the markings on some of these stones. The view from the top of this mountain was pretty spectacular.

Here you can see Usami behind me, and Mount Fuji on the other side of the mountain:

We ended our trips to the woods in early March, as spring was beginning to break, and the stinging caterpillars came out on the trees. Next winter, Sugiyama-san will return to work in the woods of Usami. This turned out to be one of the finer experiences I have had in Japan. I was nostalgic for my years in the Boy Scouts, when I used to go walking in the woods, looking at sights both new and old.