Oarai / Mito

Sunday September 6: 

This morning, we arrived at Oarai, the port and beach town for Ibaraki prefecture, just north of Nagoya. This is an agricultural area, particularly rice and grapes. We traveled to Mito, the prefecture capital and a city of 250,000, to visit sites from the Edo period (the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1861). The original shogun had 11 children, but only three sons survived the clan wars. These three established their own cities, with Mito as the city of the youngest. While the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan for 250 years, only the last shogun came from the Mito line. 

In 1841, the 9th lord of Mito (Tokugawa Nariaki) established the Kadokan school for samurai and their children. The samurai learned not only martial arts and warfare tactics but also math, Confucian philosophy, music, reading and writing and even to write poetry. Later the school added medical and astronomy facilities.  The Mito clan samurai were nearly 100% literate. The school was closed in 1872 as the national school system ramped up and the Meiji emperor suppressed the samurai. 

The same lord also designed and established the Kairakuen gardens in 1842 as a place where the students could relax and meditate after their studies. It contains over 3000 blooming trees and is considered one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan. It also has groves of different types of bamboo to make fighting staves called Bo’s, arrows, and fences. While September is not the best time to visit the garden, we did enjoy the peacefulness. Walking to the gardens we admired the decorations on the manhole covers, reminiscent of the scores of plum trees at the gardens. Each city in Japan can choose the design for their manhole covers. 

We also visited the Tokugawa museum, which contain a number of artifacts from the first shogun as well as his sons and descendants. There were displays of swords, books and other household items. It was fascinating to see the number of reference books in French and English that were in the family’s possessions. Some of the swords showed evidence of having been burned during the great Kando earthquake on 1923, when they were in storage in Tokyo. 

We have been so lucky with weather on this trip, skirting storms in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific.  This ship is also designed to ride as smoothly as possible through rough seas.  While the main typhoon that has been pummeling southern Japan has weakened and moved out to sea, this afternoon we began to rock and roll a bit (12 foot waves) on our way south to Shimizu for tomorrow. 

Pictured: interior of Kadokan, Shogun armor at the museum, “Bo” Bamboo grove at Kairakuen, manhole covers, eastern spot-billed duck