Kitsuki Samurai District

Kitsuki Samurai District

West of the small castle in Kitsuki, Oita, is a well preserved samurai district. that is registered as a Preseervation District because enough of the original layout and buildings still exist.

It is located on top of a bluff overlooking the merchant district that grew up around the castle. There were only a couple of access point which enabled it to be well guarded.

As in most samurai districts the streets are lined with high wallsand hehind them homes of higher-ranked samurai  About half a dozen of these samurai homes are now open to the public and I will post on them later.

I have previously posted on the gardens of these samurai houses....

Kabosu Juice from Oita Prefecture

Samurai Gardens of Kitsuki

Kitsuki's Samurai Gardens

Kitsuki is a small, historic castle town in Oita. It is claimed to be the smallest castle in Japan. To the west of the castle, on a high bluff overlooking the town, is a former samurai district.

 

About half a dozen of these former samurai homes are open to the public, and as these were fairly high ranking sanurai, their homes were large and included gardens.

For this post I have chosen to focus on views of the garden from inside the houses.

Kitsuki is on the southern edge of the Kunisaki Peninsula, an area I am rather fond of, and these photos were taken on the 4th day of my walk around the peninsula during a November, so the gardens had some good autumn colors.

 

Kabosu Juice From Oita Prefecture

Kaseda Samurai District

Towards the end of day 35 walking around Kyushu I reached Kaseda in what is now Minami Satsuma City. Earlier in the afternoon I had discovered the Barn Built by Giants, which remains one of my most popular posts.

In the old part of town I wandered around what must have been one of the Satsuma Clans fortified samurai villages like Chiran that I had wandered around early this morning.

Maybe not as well preserved as in Chiran, and not registered as a preservation district, but with all these tell-tale features of a semi-fortified samurai district. Apparently one garden is open to the public.

Tadayoshi Shimazu the Satsuma daimyo at the end of the 15th Century retired to this area, and there was once a castle of sorts nearby, connected to the Heike almost 1,000 years ago nothing now remains.

Chiran Samurai District

I wandered around the Samurai district in Chiran early in the morning before tourists had arrived. I recently posted on the gardens found in many of the former samurai residences. It is a Preservation District of Groups of Traditional Buildings, one of about 120 such districts around Japan, and I have come to enjoy most of the ones I have visited, though the better ones tend to be, like here in Chiran,  off the beaten track

Primarily one street, it is lined with well-constructed stone walls topped with impenetrable hedges. To get into any residence or garden you have to pass through a high-walled corridor that twists and tiurns at 90 degrees several times, a classic defensive arrangement found in many castles.

This was a semi-fortified village. The Shogunate decreed that each domain must only have one castle. This resulted in many castles being dismantled, and others moved. It was also decreed that all samurai must live within the castle town. Here in the distant lands of the Satsuma in southern Kyushu, this last law was ignored.

The Satsuma placed settlements of samurai throughout their domain, Chiran being just one. This was obviously a defensive measure by the Satsuma, but may also have been simple logistics, because the Satsuma had a high percentage of samurai. A figure of 10% is often considered the percentage of samurai in the Japanese population, but here in Satsuma the figure was above 20%.

Samurai Gardens of Chiran

At the start of day 35 of my first walk around the island of Kyushu I wandered around the former samurai district in Chiran, a small town  in the south of Kagoshima. Seven of the former samurai residences are open to the public, but none of the buildings can be entered. However they all have delightful gardens.

Most of the gardens are relatively small and usually incorporate the distant mountains as "borrowed scenery". The first photo is the garden at the Saigo Keiichiro residence. This second photo is at the Hirayama Ryoichi residence. Its garden is unusual in that it has no stone arrangements, and is primarily pruned hedges, including azalea. This type of garden was an Edo period innovation and is usually attributed to Kobori Enshu.

Obviously, all these residences belonged to fairly high ranking samurai. The above garden belonged to Sata Mifune. 6 of the 7 gardens are karesansui, dry gardens with no water.

This one belonged to Sata Tamiko, and the bottom photo belonged to Mori Shigemitsu. It is the only garden with a water feature, and I believe he was the most senior samurai of the district

Obi Samurai District

Around the old castle ruins in Obi is an area of former samurai residences. Closest to the castle were the highest ranking samurai, moving down the ranks further away from the castle until you reach the old merchant district.

Being somewhat off the beaten track the area has retained many of the buildings and the basic layout of these former times and is registered as a Historic Preservation District of groups of Traditional Buildings. There are more than 100 of these districts scattered across Japan, and while some are in major tourist areas, many are not.

I've come across quite a few on my walks in the backcountry, and in my experience some of them are quite delightful, being non touristy and ungentrified. Links to many of them Ive visited can be found at this index over at Japanvisitor.

On this trip I was in a hurry to carry on with my pilgrimage, but recently I revisited the area and spent time exploring in the houses open to the public and can recommend it to visitors to Miyazaki

Samurai with guns

These 2 draincovers are on Ishin kaido, Restoration Road, in Yuda Onsen, Yamaguchi. The restoration referred to is the Meiji restoration of 1868 whereby the government forces were defeated and the emperor "restored" to rule by the Imperial faction led by the domains of Satsuma and Choshu (the previous name for what is now Yamaguchi Prefecture). The partnership of Satsuma and Choshu had been brought about by Ryoma Sakamoto of Tosa domain. An early meeting of all three parties took place in Yuda Onsen.

The civil war to bring about the Meiji restoration is known as the Boshin war, and both sides used plenty of foreign weaponry. The Imperial faction used a lot of French Minie rifles, and these were more accurate and had a longer range than the guns used by the Shoguns forces. This may not have been a deciding factor, but is must have helped in their victory.

Yamane Family home.

On Sunday afternoon we were walking along the waterfront at Nagahama on our way back to the van after visiting the sailship Nadezhda. I stopped and took a couple of photos of some nice, old, empty houses. A man in the garden of the house inbetween asked me why I took the photos. I told him I liked these old buildings, and he asked me if I'd like to look inside. I though he meant inside the empty buildings, but what he meant was inside his house.

Mr Yamane is the 18th generation of his family to live here. I didn't think to ask how old the house was, but the beams and some of the floors ( 5cm thick slabs of wood) looked to be at least 200 years old.

The house was filled with family heirlooms, most seemed to be from the Edo Period.

There were 2 huge Kamidana.

Lots of weapons, including this thing that was attached to a 2 metre long pole. Not much up on samurai and such so I doin't know what its called.

There were lots of old dolls, and this lovely pair of statues of Daikoku and Ebisu.

My favorite object though was this miniature set of samurai armor.

On the way out through the covered courtyard between the buildings Yoko remarked that the 2 huge stone sinks reminded her of a sake brewery and Mr. Yamane told us it was a Soy Sauce brewery. That was has the family became wealthy. I mentioned that if his house was in Kyoto it would be open to the public for a hefty entrance fee. He laughed and said "everything in Kyoto is expensive"

I wondered if he had a son that would continue on living in the ancestral home, but I kind of think probably not. His kids probably live in a big city now.