Sacred Tokyo & Japanese History

Introduction In The Elusive Samurai, a mysterious girl named Shizuku stands beside Suwa Yorishige. She can talk with spirits and sacred beasts. A guide in Suwa told me he thinks Shizuku is modeled on Mishaguchi, the ancient god of Suwa, or on the Moriya family, who called that god down. So who is Mishaguchi? The gods of Suwa never stayed in one form. A Jōmon serpent god, a god defeated in Japan’s founding myths, a dragon god who raised the…

The Head of a Living God’s House: How Suwa Yorishige Actually Lived Introduction In The Elusive Samurai, Suwa Yorishige is the man who shelters the young Hōjō Tokiyuki. The real Yorishige had two faces. He was head of the family that produced a living god, the Ōhōri of Suwa Upper Shrine. He was also a vassal of the Kamakura shogunate, and more than that, a private retainer (miuchibito) of the Hōjō main line. This article follows both lives: the god’s…

If you have read or watched The Elusive Samurai, you already know the Suwa Sect: Suwa Yorishige and his allies Hoshina, Shinomiya, Unno, Nezu and Mochizuki, who risk everything for the young Hōjō Tokiyuki. In history this group is called the Suwa Shintō (諏訪神党), literally “the band of the Suwa kami.” It was not a single family. Its warriors came from all over Shinano Province, today’s Nagano Prefecture. So what held them together? The answer is faith in the kami…

If you have seen photographs of Kamakura, you have probably seen this one. A rider in medieval court dress, bow drawn, thundering down a sand track past a wooden target. Yabusame — mounted archery — at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū. It is spectacular, and it photographs beautifully, and almost every caption describes it the same way: samurai horseback archery, a demonstration of martial skill. That description is accurate and it misses the entire point. The remarkable thing is not the shooting. It…

Short answer first, because that is probably why you are here. Kazama Genba, Nezu Kamuro and Mochizuki Ayako are invented. No document records any of them. But the families they belong to — the Kazama, the Nezu and the Mochizuki — were real, and all three stood with Hōjō Tokiyuki, or stood close enough that the fiction is a reasonable one. So the characters are made up. Their placement is not. That is the easy part. The harder and more…

If you found this page after watching or reading The Elusive Samurai, you already know the name Godaiin Muneshige. You probably also know the verdict that comes attached to it: scum, monster, the worst man in the story. I understand the reaction. He betrayed a nine-year-old boy who had been placed in his care by a dying father — and that boy was his own sister’s son. But I have spent a long time with this episode now, and I…

If you have watched The Elusive Samurai (Nige Jōzu no Wakagimi), you know him as the antagonist: Ogasawara Sadamune, military governor of Shinano, a supernaturally gifted archer, and a distinctly strange man. If you have ever stood along the sand track at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura on the sixteenth of September and watched a rider in Kamakura-period hunting dress hit three targets at full gallop, you have seen something else entirely. These two things are the same thing. The riding…

I went to the Shingen-ko Festival in Kōfu because of a BBC documentary. The programme was about the fact that the retainer families of the Takeda — a clan destroyed in 1582 — still exist, still know who they are, and still gather. That struck me as worth seeing in person. So in 2026 I went. What I saw there sent me back to rewrite everything I thought I understood about a single sentence. The line A man in Takeda…

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

If you have been watching The Elusive Samurai, you have met Suwa Yorishige. He is the strange, laughing man who takes in a hunted eight-year-old boy and announces that this child will one day rule Japan. The manga makes him a prophet. That is fiction. But the real Yorishige was something stranger than a prophet, and the truth is not a softer version of the story — it is a harder one. He was a god. Not metaphorically. Institutionally. What…

  This is a companion to [The Heirloom Seal of the Realm: the empty stone that ruled China for a thousand years]. That article looked at the center — the jade in which the Son of Heaven held the whole Mandate. This one looks at the far rim. What a little island at the outermost ring of that world crossed a deadly sea to fetch was not “the Mandate” at all, but something much smaller: mere *recognition*. And the gap…

A Bodhisattva from the Northern Qi Dynasty Visiting the Tokyo National Museum — Oriental Gallery, Room 1 I recently visited the Oriental Gallery at the Tokyo National Museum — and it was wonderful! The moment I stepped into Room 1 on the first floor, a single statue caught my eye: a Standing Bodhisattva, created in Shanxi Province, China, in 552 CE during the Northern Qi dynasty. That predates even the beginning of Japan’s Asuka period. It is a piece from…