Ueda in a Day: The Shrine of Oaths, and the Kamakura That Fell in Shinano

September 6, 2026

A car-free day trip from Tokyo — written for readers who arrived here through The Elusive Samurai.

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If you have read The Elusive Samurai, you know how the story begins. Kamakura falls in 1333. A boy of the Hōjō house escapes and runs for Shinano, where a shrine priest called Suwa Yorishige takes him in. Two years later, Shinano rises.

Most people who want to walk that story go to Suwa. That is the right instinct, and I have written about Suwa Taisha elsewhere. But there is a second place in Shinano that belongs to this history, and almost no foreign visitor goes there.

It is a wide bowl of rice fields called Shioda-daira, in the city of Ueda. Locally it is nicknamed Shinshū no Kamakura — “the Kamakura of Shinano.”

That nickname is not decorative. For roughly fifty-five years before 1333, Shioda-daira was governed by a branch of the ruling Hōjō clan itself. And when Kamakura fell, they fell with it.

You can reach it from Tokyo in about ninety minutes, spend a day walking it without a car, and be home by night. Here is how.

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Part 1 — What is actually there

The Hōjō branch that ruled a valley in the mountains

In 1274 the first Mongol invasion was repelled. Three years later, Hōjō Yoshimasa — the rensho, the deputy who supported the eighth regent Hōjō Tokimune, effectively the number two man in the Kamakura government — abruptly took Buddhist vows, resigned at the age of thirty-six, and moved to his estate in Shinano.

He died four years later, aged forty. His son Kunitoki and the generation after him governed Shioda-daira for about fifty-five years in all. Money and Zen culture flowed in from Kamakura. Temples went up. That is why the valley looks the way it does.

Then, in the fifth month of 1333, the Kamakura shogunate collapsed under the attack of Nitta Yoshisada. Kunitoki and his sons rode back to Kamakura, joined the main Hōjō house, and took their own lives with it.

The Shioda Hōjō line ended there.

✦ Satoe’s Take
>
> This is the part I want Elusive Samurai readers to notice.
>
> When people ask why Hōjō Tokiyuki could raise an army in Shinano two years after everything was lost — why that province, why so fast — the usual answer is Suwa Yorishige and the Suwa shrine network. That is true and it is not the whole picture.
>
> Shinano had been full of people with direct Hōjō ties for two generations. Shioda-daira alone had been governed by a Hōjō branch for half a century. When Kamakura fell, the province did not simply contain sympathisers. It contained households that had just been ruined.
>
> The Nakasendai Rebellion of 1335 is usually filed as a failed revolt. From Shinano it looks less like an uprising and more like the last movement of people who had already lost everything and had nothing left to protect.

The shrine where two hundred and thirty-seven men swore

About fifteen minutes by local train from Ueda Station is Ikushima Tarushima Shrine.

It is a strange and very old place, and I mean that as praise.

The main sanctuary sits on a small island in a pond. Inside the inner hall — a designated Prefectural Treasure — there is no floor. The bare earth itself is the object of worship. The two deities enshrined are not people and never were:

– Ikushima — the power that gives birth to the islands and puts life into them
– Tarushima — the power that fills those islands and makes them sufficient

This is the land itself, worshipped as a god.

The east and west torii gates are aligned to the solstices, so that at the summer solstice the sun rises through the centre of the eastern gate, and at the winter solstice it sets through the centre of the western one. Light passes through the gate and lands on bare ground. In 2020 the line running from the Shinano Kokubunji temple ruins through this shrine to Bessho Onsen was recognised as a Japan Heritage route, “the sacred site of sun and earth.”

Shrine tradition says that Takeminakata, on his way to Suwa, stopped here and offered rice gruel to Ikushima and Tarushima — meaning the local gods were already here when the Suwa deity passed through.

And here is the detail that stopped me while I was researching this trip.

From the late medieval period onward, this shrine was commonly called Suwa Hosshō Daimyōjin — one of the names of the Suwa deity. It only reverted to the name Ikushima Tarushima in 1799.

Why that matters:

In 1566 and 1567, Takeda Shingen made his retainers swear written oaths of loyalty here. The oaths were written on Kumano goō hōin — talismanic paper from the Kumano shrines, the standard medium for an oath that the gods themselves would enforce. Two hundred and thirty-seven men swore, from Kai, Shinano, western Kōzuke and beyond. Eighty-three of those documents survive, and together with eleven other shrine documents they were designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan in 1987.

The city of Ueda’s own explanation of why here is blunt. Of the 237 signatories, around 130 were from Shinano — by far the largest group. Shinano was the province most exposed to recruitment offers from the Uesugi in Echigo. So Shingen chose a shrine that was prestigious in Shinano and close to the enemy his men might defect to.

The background was fear inside his own house: his eldest son Yoshinobu had opposed the campaign against the Imagawa and had been confined in 1565.

✦ Satoe’s Take
>
> Takeda Shingen already had an oath system. The Mihata Tatenashi — the clan banner and armour treated as sacred objects — was the vessel for oaths sworn inside the bloodline of Kai. That was a family constitution.
>
> The Ikushima Tarushima oaths are a different machine entirely. This one points outward, at the local lords of conquered territory. And Shingen chose the god deliberately. Not a god of Kai. A great shrine of Shinano — the province his men might defect from — under a name associated with Suwa, the house he had destroyed and whose deity he wore on his own helmet.
>
> The design says: if you betray me, the god of your own land is watching.
>
> One example from the city’s records has stayed with me. Four brothers of Murokawa Nobutoshi signed a joint oath whose sixth clause promises that if a letter of recruitment arrives from the enemy addressed to their elder brother, they will report it to the Takeda immediately and conceal nothing. The head of their own house — watched by his younger brothers, under oath.
>
> The oath was not only a promise. It was a surveillance network with a god attached.
>
> Read from the losing side, those eighty-three surviving documents are not a record of loyalty. They are proof that Shingen never quite believed in his own hold on Shinano.

The oath documents (in reproduction) are displayed inside the shrine’s kabuki stage, itself a Prefectural Treasure and one of the largest in Nagano. Entry is free. The lower shrine in the grounds — a Suwa shrine — was donated by Sanada Nobuyuki, so the Hōjō century, the Takeda oaths and the Sanada era are all present within a few hundred metres.

The province that split in two

One stop from Ueda in the other direction are the ruins of Shinano Kokubunji, a provincial temple founded under the imperial edict of 741.

Provincial temples were not purely religious. Building and maintaining them was the duty of the kokushi, the imperial provincial governor, who also attended the temple’s ceremonies. Temple and government were meant to sit together.

In Shinano they came apart. The provincial capital was originally here in Chiisagata (modern Ueda). Around the late eighth to ninth century it moved west to the Matsumoto basin, apparently because the Tōsandō highway was rerouted and Matsumoto became the junction toward the Japan Sea coast.

The government moved. The temple stayed.

Left without its patron, the temple survived for more than a century, declined in the tenth, burned in the fighting of 938, and had disappeared by the thirteenth century.

✦ Satoe’s Take
>
> I grew up in Matsumoto, so I read this with a guilty conscience.
>
> Shinano separated its religious centre from its administrative centre extremely early. Prayer stayed in Ueda; power went to Matsumoto. In administrative history that is one sentence. From the side that was left behind, it is the whole story: the temple did not lose its buildings first. It lost its budget and its authority first. The fire of 938 was the ending, not the cause.
>
> And that early loss is exactly why Shioda-daira later became the place a retired Hōjō deputy chose, and where a Takeda warlord went to collect oaths. A landscape that power had already stepped away from turned out to be very good at holding sacred things.

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Part 2 — How to actually do this in one day, without a car

Getting there

– Tokyo / Ueno / Omiya → Ueda on the Hokuriku Shinkansen (Asama or Hakutaka), roughly 80–100 minutes.
– Ueda is on JR East, so it is covered by the usual JR East rail passes. Check your specific pass before you book.

Getting around — the one thing that decides your day

From Ueda Station, a small private railway called the Ueda Electric Railway Bessho Line runs out into Shioda-daira:

– 11.6 km, 15 stations, about 30 minutes end to end
– Roughly one train per hour

That last line is the whole planning problem. This is not a network you can improvise on. Decide your train times before you leave Tokyo, or you will spend fifty minutes on a platform.

Two important notes:

1. The Bessho Line is not JR and is not covered by JR passes. Pay separately.
2. The Shinano Kokubunji ruins are on a different railway again — the Shinano Railway, one stop from Ueda. Same station building, different platform.

The stops

Bessho Onsen, the end of the line

The terminus is a small hot spring town and it is where the Shioda Hōjō money went.

– Anrakuji — its octagonal three-storied pagoda is a National Treasure and the only octagonal pagoda of its kind surviving in Japan.
– Kitamuki Kannon — literally “the north-facing Kannon,” paired in popular belief with Zenkōji in Nagano; the devout visit both.
– Zenzanji, with an Important Cultural Property pagoda, and Jōrakuji.
– Public bath houses (sotoyu) in the town, where you can soak for a very small fee without staying overnight.

If you have any interest in medieval Japanese architecture, the octagonal pagoda alone justifies the trip.

One seasonal thing, with a warning

Ueda is one of Japan’s best-known matsutake mushroom regions, and it has an unusual local institution: matsutake goya, mountain huts that open for about two months in autumn and serve nothing but matsutake courses, up in the pine forest where the mushrooms grow.

I have booked Matsutakeyama Bessho Waen, at 650 m on the slope above Bessho Onsen, with a view down over the whole of Shioda-daira. It offers a free shuttle from Bessho Onsen Station, which is what makes it possible without a car.

Warning, and this is the practical heart of this article:

– The 2026 season is scheduled to run from 11 September to late November. Before 11 September, the hut is shut.
– Reservations are required, and required for the shuttle. Dinner service (after 15:00) is reservation-only.
– Prices are high. This is a luxury ingredient.
– Ueda’s tourism association notes plainly that matsutake yields depend on weather and rainfall, and that in poor years mushrooms from outside the region may be served. Ask when you book if origin matters to you.

If your dates fall before the season opens, replace lunch with Bessho Onsen’s temples and a public bath. You lose nothing structurally.

A model day

How to build it:

1. Fix the restaurant reservation first if you want matsutake — the shuttle time is the spine of the day.
2. Fit the Bessho Line timetable around it. One train an hour; if it does not fit, cut the Kokubunji ruins.
3. Check the last shinkansen from Ueda to Tokyo before anything else. That is your real deadline.
4. Do matsutake at lunch, not dinner, if you are returning the same day.

If you would rather not rush, Bessho Onsen is a genuine hot spring town with inns, and staying one night turns this from a tight schedule into a slow one.

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Why I think this trip is worth your day

Ueda markets itself on the Sanada clan — the castle, the Sanada Maru connection, the red armour. That is a winners’ story, and it is well told.

Underneath it, in the same small valley, there is another sequence: a provincial capital that walked away, a Hōjō branch that came here to retire and died in Kamakura anyway, a shrine of the bare earth that a warlord borrowed because he was afraid of his own men, and eighty-three signatures that survive because someone did not trust the people who wrote them.

Everything here belongs to somebody who lost.

That is what I come to Shinano for.

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Before you go

– [ ] Matsutake hut: opening date (11 September in 2026), reservation, shuttle
– [ ] Ueda Electric Railway Bessho Line timetable — not covered by JR passes
– [ ] Shinano Railway timetable for Shinano-Kokubunji
– [ ] Last shinkansen from Ueda to Tokyo
– [ ] Ikushima Tarushima Shrine office hours (8:30–16:30)

Opening hours, prices and timetables change. Please confirm with the official sites before travelling.

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A note on sources and certainty. Dates, designations and document counts above follow the City of Ueda’s published explanations, the shrine’s own tradition, and standard reference works; the digital archive of the eighty-three oath letters is maintained by the Ueda City Museum. Where I have moved from record to interpretation, I have marked it as ✦ Satoe’s Take. One open question I have left open: Shioda Castle is often described as the seat of the three Shioda Hōjō generations, but some local historians date the castle structure itself to the Muromachi period. I am not qualified to settle that, so I have not.