Samurai and Silk (reading notes)
Aug. 29th, 2007 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138By Haru Matsukata Reischauer; the book is a dual biography of both of her grandfathers, who were born toward the end of the Shogunate. Various excerpts of interest, mostly about her paternal grandfather; my attention span went plotz about halfway through the book, so I returned it to the library.
p. 28: "In Satsuma a samurai boy was not just a member of his immediate family but was considered a treasure of the domain. He would grow up to serve his lord and was, in a sense, merely entrusted to the care of his family in the meantime. Thus boys were treated with special deference by their mothers and sisters. They were kept separate from the girls at an early age to ensure that their virility was unsullied. Even the laundry of the boys and men was washed in separate tubs from that for females and hung on separate laundry poles to dry; bedding was marked male and female; even needles used to sew male clothing were kept separate. Girls were confined for the most part to their homes, and on days like the Girls' Festivals, when they had their turn to have fun outside, the boys fled to the hills. Brothers and sisters meeting on the street would not speak to one another."
p28 ff: samurai boys were inducted into a goju (village fraternity) at age 6 and remained in it until age 26, which was considered to be the true boundary of adulthood; until then, men were now allowed to drink, smoke, or get married. In Kagoshima (a castle town and the capital city of Satsuma province), the goju was divided into 33 regional districts w/ 30-40 boys each (who interacted/competed with other groups in "turf wars"); the districts were subdivided into three age groups each: kochigo (ages 6-10), osechigo (11-14), and nise (15-25).
There was a strict code of conduct that was generally enforced by the rest of the immediate group shaming the offender. Formal lessons were also integrated into goju activities; every morning, a young boy would leave his home when the temple bells rang at 7 am (or whatever the idiomatic equivalent is) to join the rest of his district's kochigo at the house of an older boy who'd been assigned as their teacher. The lessons (individual, in order of who arrived first) mostly involved rote memorization/recitation of classic texts, including the Iroha. After this lesson, the boy would go home and work on the latest assignment until breakfast (rice gruel with sweet potatoes).
The kochigo would then reunite for the rest of the day until sunset, alternating in ~2hr blocks between group physical activity (for this age group, energetic but well-behaved play, like jumprope or hill-climbing, unless it was raining in which case they'd stay inside and play educational card games[*]) and studying the daily text(after an initial group reading, dividing into pairs to drill each other; also practicing calligraphy on the 2-3 kanji that'd been assigned for the day).
[*: one such game is described as teaching them the names of all 260+ daimyo and the sizes of their respective domains as measured in koku.]
Graduation into the older groups was celebrated by hazing the new boys (e.g., dogpiling onto one of them, and then stuffing him into a wooden barrel and rolling it down the street). The osechigo had an additional two-hour study-hall in the evenings and sat in on some of the advanced lessons in local military history etc. for the nise.
p. 45: interesting tidbit about Okubo Toshimichi (same guy who was assassinated near the start of RK's Kyoto Arc)-- during his youth, he himself was the leader of a group of Imperialist "young hotheads" (mostly of men from the Mito domain) known as the Seichu-gumi; some of their members assassinated Ii Naosuke, a powerful daimyo who'd been a chief minister of the Shogunate's regime in Edo. (One of the author's grandfathers, Matsukata Masayoshi, eventually became prime minister several years after Okubo's own assassination; the two men had been childhood friends.)
pp 54-55: (oh dear) the samurai sport of inu ou mono (dog-chasing) consisted of putting dogs into a bamboo-fenced enclosure and riding around on horseback to shoot them with arrows.
p. 65 ff: soon after the Restoration, in the summer of 1868, Okubo appointed Matsukata Masayoshi (hereafter MM) as the governor of Hido, a town in northeastern Kyushu. To minimize the then-common practices of abortion and infanticide, MM established an orphanage for illegitimate or otherwise unwanted children, who could be left anonymously at the front door. He personally named all of them, initially putting the same matsu (pine tree) element into each one. When the supply of wetnurses ran out, MM built an associated dairy with cows from Nagasaki and milking equipment from Shanghai; the babies thrived on the cows' milk, although MM never drank ths stuff himself. The orphanage developed such a good reputation that childless couples started to come there to adopt children.
pp 102-104: MM had three concubines, taken up in succession starting in his forties; unusually, he acknowledged all of their chldren (eight total).
No one seems to remember the name of the first concubine (the author's grandmother), but after giving birth to three children, she became a Buddhist nun. The second concubine also gave birth to three children; she was "subsequently adopted inot a prosperous merchant family in the Kansai area, and, as their daughter, was married to an Osaka industrialist." The third concubine was installed as the housekeeper of MM's seaside villa near Tokyo, but to preserve propriety, he didn't permit her to come to the main house or to travel on the same train as his wife.
The first two concubines' children were brought into his central household when they were toddlers and were lovingly raised by his wife, who treated them the same as her own ten children (she also had an eleventh child somewhere in the chronology who didn't survive infancy). By the time the third concubine's children were born, MM's wife felt too old to raise them herself, but she arranged for them to be brought up by other members of the family and they were given the same full legal status as the other kids.
All of MM's kids were unusually robust, in that so few of them died during childhood (the Meiji Emperor fathered 20 children, but most of them died very young); this seems to be largely thanks to the nutritional recommenations of MM's Western-trained friend/doctor, who advised them to substitute barley for most of the polished white rice in the standard Japanese diet, and to eat lots of meat. The same doctor (Takaki Kenkan) "became famous as the chief surgeon of the Imperial Japanese Navy who eliminated beriberi[*] through diet."
[*: thiamine deficiency, common in people whose staple diet is white rice without other sources of vitamin B1]
pp 264-265: MM's wife and his four eldest sons (born during the revolution) remained in Kagoshima until their family home was destroyed during Saigo Takamori's rebellion; the first son, born in 1862, briefly attended the same goju that MM had gone through. When they moved to Tokyo in 1877, all of the children (both boys and girls) were enrolled in "the prestigious Peers School founded in 1847 in Kyoto for children of court nobles. In 1877 it had been reorganized along Western lines for children of the imperial family and the nobility."
This site has the related entry
p. 28: "In Satsuma a samurai boy was not just a member of his immediate family but was considered a treasure of the domain. He would grow up to serve his lord and was, in a sense, merely entrusted to the care of his family in the meantime. Thus boys were treated with special deference by their mothers and sisters. They were kept separate from the girls at an early age to ensure that their virility was unsullied. Even the laundry of the boys and men was washed in separate tubs from that for females and hung on separate laundry poles to dry; bedding was marked male and female; even needles used to sew male clothing were kept separate. Girls were confined for the most part to their homes, and on days like the Girls' Festivals, when they had their turn to have fun outside, the boys fled to the hills. Brothers and sisters meeting on the street would not speak to one another."
p28 ff: samurai boys were inducted into a goju (village fraternity) at age 6 and remained in it until age 26, which was considered to be the true boundary of adulthood; until then, men were now allowed to drink, smoke, or get married. In Kagoshima (a castle town and the capital city of Satsuma province), the goju was divided into 33 regional districts w/ 30-40 boys each (who interacted/competed with other groups in "turf wars"); the districts were subdivided into three age groups each: kochigo (ages 6-10), osechigo (11-14), and nise (15-25).
There was a strict code of conduct that was generally enforced by the rest of the immediate group shaming the offender. Formal lessons were also integrated into goju activities; every morning, a young boy would leave his home when the temple bells rang at 7 am (or whatever the idiomatic equivalent is) to join the rest of his district's kochigo at the house of an older boy who'd been assigned as their teacher. The lessons (individual, in order of who arrived first) mostly involved rote memorization/recitation of classic texts, including the Iroha. After this lesson, the boy would go home and work on the latest assignment until breakfast (rice gruel with sweet potatoes).
The kochigo would then reunite for the rest of the day until sunset, alternating in ~2hr blocks between group physical activity (for this age group, energetic but well-behaved play, like jumprope or hill-climbing, unless it was raining in which case they'd stay inside and play educational card games[*]) and studying the daily text(after an initial group reading, dividing into pairs to drill each other; also practicing calligraphy on the 2-3 kanji that'd been assigned for the day).
[*: one such game is described as teaching them the names of all 260+ daimyo and the sizes of their respective domains as measured in koku.]
Graduation into the older groups was celebrated by hazing the new boys (e.g., dogpiling onto one of them, and then stuffing him into a wooden barrel and rolling it down the street). The osechigo had an additional two-hour study-hall in the evenings and sat in on some of the advanced lessons in local military history etc. for the nise.
p. 45: interesting tidbit about Okubo Toshimichi (same guy who was assassinated near the start of RK's Kyoto Arc)-- during his youth, he himself was the leader of a group of Imperialist "young hotheads" (mostly of men from the Mito domain) known as the Seichu-gumi; some of their members assassinated Ii Naosuke, a powerful daimyo who'd been a chief minister of the Shogunate's regime in Edo. (One of the author's grandfathers, Matsukata Masayoshi, eventually became prime minister several years after Okubo's own assassination; the two men had been childhood friends.)
pp 54-55: (oh dear) the samurai sport of inu ou mono (dog-chasing) consisted of putting dogs into a bamboo-fenced enclosure and riding around on horseback to shoot them with arrows.
p. 65 ff: soon after the Restoration, in the summer of 1868, Okubo appointed Matsukata Masayoshi (hereafter MM) as the governor of Hido, a town in northeastern Kyushu. To minimize the then-common practices of abortion and infanticide, MM established an orphanage for illegitimate or otherwise unwanted children, who could be left anonymously at the front door. He personally named all of them, initially putting the same matsu (pine tree) element into each one. When the supply of wetnurses ran out, MM built an associated dairy with cows from Nagasaki and milking equipment from Shanghai; the babies thrived on the cows' milk, although MM never drank ths stuff himself. The orphanage developed such a good reputation that childless couples started to come there to adopt children.
pp 102-104: MM had three concubines, taken up in succession starting in his forties; unusually, he acknowledged all of their chldren (eight total).
No one seems to remember the name of the first concubine (the author's grandmother), but after giving birth to three children, she became a Buddhist nun. The second concubine also gave birth to three children; she was "subsequently adopted inot a prosperous merchant family in the Kansai area, and, as their daughter, was married to an Osaka industrialist." The third concubine was installed as the housekeeper of MM's seaside villa near Tokyo, but to preserve propriety, he didn't permit her to come to the main house or to travel on the same train as his wife.
The first two concubines' children were brought into his central household when they were toddlers and were lovingly raised by his wife, who treated them the same as her own ten children (she also had an eleventh child somewhere in the chronology who didn't survive infancy). By the time the third concubine's children were born, MM's wife felt too old to raise them herself, but she arranged for them to be brought up by other members of the family and they were given the same full legal status as the other kids.
All of MM's kids were unusually robust, in that so few of them died during childhood (the Meiji Emperor fathered 20 children, but most of them died very young); this seems to be largely thanks to the nutritional recommenations of MM's Western-trained friend/doctor, who advised them to substitute barley for most of the polished white rice in the standard Japanese diet, and to eat lots of meat. The same doctor (Takaki Kenkan) "became famous as the chief surgeon of the Imperial Japanese Navy who eliminated beriberi[*] through diet."
[*: thiamine deficiency, common in people whose staple diet is white rice without other sources of vitamin B1]
pp 264-265: MM's wife and his four eldest sons (born during the revolution) remained in Kagoshima until their family home was destroyed during Saigo Takamori's rebellion; the first son, born in 1862, briefly attended the same goju that MM had gone through. When they moved to Tokyo in 1877, all of the children (both boys and girls) were enrolled in "the prestigious Peers School founded in 1847 in Kyoto for children of court nobles. In 1877 it had been reorganized along Western lines for children of the imperial family and the nobility."
This site has the related entry
Gakushuin: literally the "Hall of Learning." Gakushuin is a private, coeducational, multi-campus school system in Tokyo. The institution has a long association with the Imperial Household and the aristocracy. Gakushuin traces its roots to a lecture hall for court nobles established on the Kyoto palace grounds by Emperor Ninkō (r. 1817-1846). In 1876 the school relocated to Tokyo under the name Kazoku Gakkō (Kazoku School). The following year the institution changed its name to Gakushuin. In 1884 the Gakushuin became a state-supported (kanritsu) primary and secondary school under the jurisdiction of the Kunaishō, not the Ministry of Education. Gakushuin enrollment was required of imperial and kazoku children as a rule, but eventually opened to selected commoner children. In 1906 the school established a separate department for girls, eventually known as Joshi Gakushuin. Before the war, the name Gakushuin was frequently translated into English as the Peers' School. In 1947 the American occupation authorities divested Gakushuin of its special status by ending its state support, removing it from the jurisdiction of the Kunaishō and placing it under the authority of the Ministry of Education, like all other Japanese schools. Since the war, the Gakushuin has evolved into a private, coeducational comprehensive educational institution (kindergarten through university).