Bakumatsu Pilgrimage in the Western Seto Inland Sea (preparation notes)

“I'd rather go to Suwoh-Ohshima,” said my younger daughter. “What on the earth is it?” asked my wife. “A tiny island occupied by Tokugawa Shogunate Navy at the beginning of the Second Punitive Expedition to Choh-shuh,” said I. “What are there?” asked her mother. “I just want to immerse myself in the air there,” replied the girl.
Thus our pilgrimage to Suwoh, the eastern half of today's Yamaguchi Prefecture, started.
Suwoh-Ohshima is just a strait away from Honshu Island, and is hooked with a bridge today. Yet, the island is not along Shinkansen Line, and you must take a local train and a bus for hours to get there even from its nearest Shinkansen station, Iwakuni. The most convenient way to visit the island may be hiring a rental car.
The most reasonable way to get around there is by long-distance bus. A night bus runs to Shimonoseki, the largest city in Yamaguchi, and stops at Iwakuni on its way. A day bus runs either to Hiroshima or Kokura, but both of them arrive there in the afternoon and leaves there early in the morning. If I were much younger, I would plan a four-day trip with two stays on the bus and one stay in a hotel. That sounds like a suicide to today's me.
An idea hit me. A day bus runs to Matsuyama very often, as often as to Kochi, where we visited last spring. We might take a ferry to Suwoh-Ohshima from Mitsuhama, a port town near Matsuyama. The sea used to be a road rather than a boundary.
The itinerary has, however, a risk. August 18/19 is just after Bon holidays. Beach hotels and inns must be still busy, being occupied with sea bathers. It may be at the start of a typhoon season as well. That might be worked out by staying in Matsuyama, although our stay in Suwoh-Ohshima will be a short one.
The port of Matsuyama has 3 districts. Its oldest district is called Mitsu-hama Port. The history of Mitsu-hama Port goes back to Muromachi Period, when Kohno Clan castled to the opposite bank (Minato-yama Joh, namely Port-Mountain Castle), and made it to the base of their Navy.
Kohno Clan used to be the biggest clan in Iyo, the Northwestern part of Shikoku Island, and prosperous for about 400 years till it was subverted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1585. Its main castle used to be in today's Dogo Hot Spring area, and was called Yu-duki Joh, namely Hot-spring Built Castle).
It is in this Mitsu-hama Port that Natsume Soseki got off when he went for his post to Matsuyama in 1895, and thus the port became one of the stages of the popular novel Bocchan, one of two youth-market-oriented well-known novels by Sohseki. Of course at that time, there was not a satisfactory wharf, and was only a summer-house-like waiting room as an equipment of the port. People used to take a shallop to get on a ship dropped anchor off the shore.
Today, a car ferry sails to the Yanai port in Yamaguchi Prefecture from this port.
In the Autumn of 1853, Murata Zohroku, later known as Ohmura Masujiro, a founder of modern Japanese Army, sailed from Yanai to Matsuyama on his way from Choh-shuh to Uwajima for his post. That is the one of two reasons why my daughter wanted to visit Suwoh-ohshima.
Ohmura had wanted to sail directly from Yanai to Matsuyama, but having found no service available, and having made up his mind to go island-by-island, he took a boat from Tohsaki to Suoh-ohshima. According to Shiba Ryotaro's Kahin, he arrived at the Komatsu Port on the island, and stayed there for one night. My daughter had wanted to breathe the air Murata (or Ohmura) breathed.


The second reason why my daughter wanted to visit the island is that it is an old battlefield of the war between Choh-shuh and Bakufu, Tokugawa Shogunate, in the year 1865. The war has 3 kinds of names. If you are pro-Shogunate, you call it Choh-shuh Seibatsu. If you stand neutral, you may call it Choh-Baku Sensoh. If you lived in Cho-shu at that time, you definitely called it Shi-kyo Sensoh, Four Fronts War.
Kashin writes; Shogunate had formulated the strategy; "first of all, to attack Ohshima with its fleet, to land the Army soldiers and occupy the whole island, and to make Kuga Port a temporary naval port" to have command of the Western Seto Inland Sea.
The first attack was on a morning, June 7. A battleship of Tokugawa Shogunate came, sailed around Ohshima, bombarded the fishing villages Agenoshoh, Tononyuh, and Yuh to burn out, and left somewhere. The next day, the Shogunate Army and Navy raided Ohshima in force. They bombarded several places, and landed soldiers afterward.
In Ohshima's coast of Kuga, the Shogunate fleet of warships, each with 1000 tons or more, is heavily anchored. Those days, night attack was considered to be impossible in naval battles. Takasugi Shinsaku, a well known revolutionist and military tactician at Bakumatsu, the end of Edo Period, dared do it. His military ship alone opened fire against Shogunate fleet, which had turned off their steam, and run away into the dark with its lamplights off. Having only light cannons, the physical damage he gave was not so big, but the psychological fear was so huge that the fleet escaped from the sea around Choh-shu to the east in panic, with their beached blue forces left. After a while, they were unseated from the island.
We have another reason why to have chosen Matsuyama route and stay. Matsuyama has Saka-no-ue-no-Kumo Museum.
The novel Saka no ue no Kumo starts as:
“A really small country is trying to get civilized.
“One of the islands of the country is Shikoku Island, and Shikoku is divided into Sanuki, Awa, Tosa, and Iyo. The capital of Iyo is Matsuyama.”
Matsuyama is a birth place of Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930), Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918), and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Saka no ue no Kumo continues:
“We may say the main character of this story is small Japan at this time. We, however, should follow three people.”
Its author, Shiba Ryohtaroh, tried to describe how Japan modernized itself by writing a story of struggling young people at the time.
He writes about his interest in the stage of Japanese history:
“The 30 years or more after the Meiji Restoration till Russo-Japanese War is very distinctive in the history of Japanese culture and mentality, in its long history.
“There used to be no age as optimistic as this.”
He thought people at the time were, however poor they were, optimistically struggling to progress:
“Optimists walk forward, as often the case in such an era, just looking ahead. As a cloud in a blue heaven shines over a hill they are climbing, they keep climbing the hill fixing their eyes just on the cloud.”
Have we ever caught the cloud?