The Water Transportation in the Kanto Plain and the "Piracy" there (7)

     The Yanada Family might have started as a small-scale powerful family based in Yanada Holy Manor and moved to the Sekiyado and Mizuumi area, though they had their legendary history which connected them to an ancient central noble family.  It is unknown if they escaped due to the defeat of their possible boss, the Fujiwara Family, or they were headhunted because of their own competence in water management engineering.  Time went by, and, in Medieval japan, the transportation of commodities thrived.  In Kanto Plain, they were merchandised through inland waterways, or through rivers and lakes.  Living in the junction area between the 2 river systems enabled the family become more powerful, as powerful as to support Kanto Deputy Shogunate in Koga, which was just about 8 kilometers north either from Sekiyado or Mizuumi.

     As we know what pirates did in the Seto Inland Sea,  we can easily notice what the Yanada Family was doing was very similar to what pirates did on the sea.  We may be able to safely define the family as river pirates.  It is almost certain that there were other smaller-scale river pirates in the 2 river systems in the Kanto Plain.  There are, for example, still 45 more place names which include the phrase “seki” (a checkpoint) in them in the Kanto Plain, like Iseki, Ozeki, Sekito etc.  What those river pirates did at those checkpoints were the Medieval version of what Katori Shrine did in ancient times, but it is not clear how many of the place names have ancient origins, and still how many of them were riverine checkpoints in ancient times.  We need to find more written documents and records, and, maybe, do even excavation and exploration to talk about the river pirates in Kanto.