［essay］Introduction & Excerpt from “Kyoto and Tajima’s Underground Connections” / Junya Yamda

In the Hyogo Prefecture city of Toyooka, where I live, and its surroundings are many graves scattered across the foot and middle of the mountains. My research began with an interest in this culture of putting graves on mountains, and I went around listening to stories about Toyooka’s memorial services. The grave of a member of the imperial family, who fled Kyoto. The memorial service for people who committed suicide en masse in Manchuria, having been sent there as settlers during World War II. Death and the like are left behind in some form or other, both old and comparatively recent. This research has helped me find a way to sympathize with people very remote from my life. A life of plenty is not only about the people in the here and now leading enjoyable lives. In which case, how can we sympathize with those who feel remote from us? I looked for answers to this in my research.

The following is a translation of an excerpt from the essay “Kyoto and Tajima’s Underground Connections” by Junya Yamada.

Toyooka is the final resting place of Prince Masanari. The fourth son of Emperor Go-Toba, he was sent into exile by the Hojo clan after the end of the Jokyu War, along with the rest of his family. His place of exile was here in the Toyooka area, where he lived for thirty-five years from the age of twenty-two to fifty-seven. After his death, locals built a grave for the prince. It is located on a somewhat elevated site at the foot of a mountain. What was the mindset of the people at the time, when they laid to rest a nobleman on their local mountain? The grave is fenced off and a visitor can only look at it from outside the site, but it seems well maintained. I found myself spontaneously admiring this beautiful, old grave. Suffice to say, it is fascinating that this prince, who was effectively a stranger in this land, has his grave here, and which has remained here until the present. It seems to suggest much about how memorial service culture is utilized. Historically, this region (formerly known as Tajima Province) was full of banished figures and those who fled Kyoto. Empress Taiza, for instance, the mother of Prince Shotoku, is said to have lived in what is now Kyotango after she fled the conflict between the Soga and Mononobe clans. That story reached Toyooka and became a local legend. At the end of the feudal period in the mid-nineteenth century, Katsura Kogoro fled Kyoto and apparently came to Tajima. In the town of Tanto, there is a checkpoint where Katsura passed through in disguise, while he is said to have hidden at an inn in Kinosaki. At Yanagihara Shrine, right by Kinosaki Marine World in the coastal area of Seto, Prince Masanari would stand and look out at the Sea of Japan and over to the Oki Islands, where his father was exiled. The commoners at the time would watch the prince mournfully gazing out to sea, and named a tree that grew there the Pine of Lament. The location is mountainous and was called the Waiting Mountain. The signs of this sad story remain quietly behind in the landscape.