And Now, For a Little Japanese History and Heraldry

Let me just say this right up front: I probably spend more time watching various shows on NHK, the Japanese English-speaking channel, than I do just about any other channel. (Although PBS probably runs a reasonably close second.) I like shows about Japanese art, history, scenic travel, and so on, and over the years I have learned a lot about the country.

So much, in fact, that my late wife and I decided that we could never visit Japan. Not because we didn't want to, but because we couldn't afford to ship all of the stuff we would buy there back home. You know, the pottery, the metalwork, the art, the fabrics and the yarns (for her), the paper, and so on and so forth. 

With all that as background, I was recently watching a show entitled Samurai Castles, and it covered, in part, Nagoya Castle and its history.

The Castle was built in the early 1600s on the site of an earlier castle. The port of Nagoya was important at that time, because it lay on the main route between Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, and it was a way for the new shogun to help consolidate his newly-acquired power following his victory at the Battle of Sekigehara in 1600.

And as I was watching that episode of Samurai Castles, it was obvious to me that the new castle there had been built by the new shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Now this was in part because I had been listening to the narrator, but more than that, because the castle is covered, Covered!, I say, in the Tokugawa kamon.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, mon, also called monshō, mondokoro, and kamon, are Japanese emblems used to decorate and identify an individual, a family, or (more recently) an institution, municipality or business entity.

While mon is an encompassing term that may refer to any such device, kamon and mondokoro refer specifically to emblems that are used to identify a family.

Let me show you what I mean with these screenshots of the program.

In each of these photos, on the eaves at various places, and on the circular ends of the roof tiles, you can clearly see the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa kamon. All of which serve to designate just whose castle this is.

Naturally, though, Ieyasu didn't build this castle himself. Following the Battle of Sekigehara in 1600, he reorganized roughly 200 daimyo and their territories into han, which were assessed by rice production.

Now, daimyo were powerful magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and nominally subordinate to the emperor and the kuge (an aristocratic class). In the term, dai means 'large', and myō stands for myōden, meaning 'private land'. (So, not terribly unlike the counts and their counties in Europe. Just sayin'.)

So in 1609, when the new shogun decided to rebuild Nagoya Castle, he levied the daimyo in central and southern Japan to supply the money, materials, and labor to do so. (As a plus, at least from his point of view, this would keep the daimyo sufficiently occupied and sufficiently poor that they couldn't set up an effective opposition to his rule. This tactic worked so well here and elsewhere that Japan had a nationwide peace for the next 250 years.)

Anyway, all that is basically an introduction to this next graphic, which shows the kamon of the daimyo from central and southern Japan who were drafted into helping to rebuild Nagoya Castle:

And there you have it! A brief introduction and explication with examples of Japanese "heraldry" as found in the history and in the structure of Nagoya Castle in central Japan.

Who knew you could find out so much about Japanese heraldry in a single 50-minute show while sitting in your own living room?